Best Rooftop Bars in Buenos Aires 2025

By a named editor

Fredrik Filipsson — Co-founder & Editor in Chief · LinkedIn ↗
Last reviewed 2026-04-17 · How we pick bars

Buenos Aires lives outdoors. The terraces of the city's palaces and apartment buildings — the mansard roofs, the zinc cornices, the ornamental balustrades that Spanish and Italian architects applied to this flat South American plain with baroque generosity — were always intended to be occupied. The city's rooftop bar scene has caught up with the architecture, which is to say that it is now magnificent: a collection of spaces that understand that drinking is elevated, in every sense, by height, warm air, and a view of a city that was built to impress from exactly this angle.

When to go: Buenos Aires rooftop season runs from October through April (Southern Hemisphere summer). The best evenings are warm nights between December and February, when the porteños themselves are out late and the terraces don't empty until 2am. Most venues have retractable roofs or indoor overflow for the cooler winter months. Sunset — which comes late, after 8pm in December — is the sweet spot for arriving.

01 / 08

Milión

Editor's Pick Recoleta French Mansion $$$

Milión occupies a restored French neoclassical mansion on Paraná in Recoleta, and the top terrace — four floors up, looking south across the city's most architecturally dense neighbourhood — is one of the finest positions in Buenos Aires from which to drink something cold and watch the light change. The building was constructed in 1913 and restored in the 1990s without the kind of heavy-handed contemporary intrusion that has ruined similar projects elsewhere; the terrace still feels like it belongs to the house.

The cocktail list at Milión is long and leans toward the elaborate — a Argentine-French fusion of spirits and techniques that sometimes works better than it should. The Fernet sour (yes, Fernet, in a sour context) is genuinely excellent: the bitter herbal liqueur that Argentines drink with Coca-Cola as a matter of near-compulsory national identity turns out to work well with egg white, lemon, and a touch of honey syrup. The Argentine malbec Kir Royale is a Friday-evening institution. Reserve the terrace for summer evenings; it fills by 9pm without notice.

Peak season note: From mid-December through January, Milión's terrace operates on a reservation-only basis for weekend evenings. Book at least three days in advance during this period.

02 / 08

Gran Bar Danzón

Recoleta Wine Bar Rooftop Terrace $$$

Gran Bar Danzón is one of the places that invented Buenos Aires's modern bar culture, and its terrace — which opened three years after the bar itself, when the building above was partially acquired — has become a destination in its own right. The focus here is Argentine wine, approached with the same seriousness that the city's best sommeliers apply to their selection: small producers from Mendoza, Patagonia, and the northwest are listed alongside brief explanations of terroir that are educational without being condescending.

The cocktail programme is secondary but not neglected: the Malbec Old Fashioned (bourbon, malbec reduction, orange bitters) has been on the menu for a decade and keeps getting ordered because it is right. The terrace has the city's best view of the Recoleta necropolis at night — the marble mausoleums lit by floodlights against a black sky, with the odd cat visible prowling between the monuments. It is an atmospheric combination that Buenos Aires achieves without apparent effort.

03 / 08

878 Bar — Rooftop

Craft Cocktail Leader Villa Crespo $$ From 7pm

878 is one of the bars that changed the Buenos Aires cocktail conversation — a small, serious operation in Villa Crespo that brought craft cocktail principles (house-made ingredients, seasonal menus, bartenders who read books about fermentation) to a city that was, until relatively recently, primarily interested in Fernet and Coke. The rooftop — added when the bar expanded into the building above — is an extension of that philosophy into outdoor space: low furniture, string lights, a sound system playing cumbia at a volume that allows conversation, and a short cocktail menu focused on Argentine spirits.

The focus on local spirits is particularly interesting. Argentina has a developing craft distilling scene — malbec-based brandies, indigenous grain spirits, and botanical gins made with Andean herbs — and 878 uses these as primary spirits rather than curiosities. The Torrontés Spritz (using the Argentine white grape in a wine-based cocktail with local herbs and soda) is the quintessential 878 summer drink. The rooftop fills quickly on Thursday through Saturday; arriving before 9pm is the reliable strategy.

Best Architecture

Milión, Recoleta

Best Wine Selection

Gran Bar Danzón

Best Local Spirits

878 Bar, Villa Crespo

Best Views

Hotel Madero Sky Bar

04 / 08

Hotel Madero Sky Bar

Puerto Madero Hotel Rooftop Pool Access $$$

Hotel Madero sits at the edge of Puerto Madero, the converted dockland district that transformed itself from industrial waterfront into Buenos Aires's most contemporary neighbourhood in the 1990s. The rooftop pool bar — which guests of the hotel can access as part of their stay, and external visitors can book in advance for a minimum spend — offers the most unobstructed view of the Río de la Plata available from any bar in the city: a vast, brown, calm inland sea that the city faces but somehow never quite acknowledges from street level.

The drinks programme is hotel-bar quality rather than craft-bar quality, which is to say it is technically correct and priced accordingly. The daytime frozen cocktail menu (frozen caipiroskas, frozen mojitos, a frozen Aperol Spritz that somehow remains respectable) is appropriate to the poolside format. In the evening, the bar shifts toward a more serious cocktail list with some locally-sourced ingredients. Come for the view and the swimming pool access; stay for the Pisco Sour, which they make with the correct Peruvian pisco rather than the Chilean substitute.

Seasonal access: The rooftop pool is open October through April. The bar operates year-round with a retractable cover for the winter months.

05 / 08

El Preferido de Palermo — Azotea

Cultural Landmark Palermo Soho $$ From 6pm

El Preferido is one of those restaurants-become-institutions that Buenos Aires produces with what seems like deliberate intent: a corner bodegón (traditional grocery-bar) in Palermo that has been operating in some form since 1952 and whose rooftop terrace — the azotea, added a few years ago without compromising the ground-floor aesthetic — has become the preferred pre-dinner location for the Palermo creative class. The drinks list is proudly Argentine: national wines poured by the glass at prices that make the hotel bars look embarrassing, a small cocktail list built on Angostura bitters and local spirits, and a house vermouth served in the old Buenos Aires style: on ice, with a splash of soda, an olive, and a small snack.

This last detail matters. The porteño tradition of drinking vermouth with food before lunch or dinner — the aperitivo culture that arrived with the Italian immigrants and never left — is best experienced somewhere that has been doing it for decades without irony. El Preferido is that place, and the azotea version of the experience, with the Palermo rooftops visible in every direction and the sound of the neighbourhood's evening beginning below, is one of the most specifically Buenos Aires experiences a bar can offer.

06 / 08

Florería Atlántico — Rooftop Garden

Retiro Latin America No.1 $$$ From 7pm

Florería Atlántico is one of the highest-ranked bars in the world — it has occupied a consistent position in the World's 50 Best Bars list for years — and its basement bar, built inside a former flower shop with a speakeasy aesthetic, receives most of the attention. But the rooftop garden, which runs on summer evenings and seats approximately forty people on a terrace planted with edible herbs that find their way into the cocktails below, offers a different version of the same experience: the craft and the storytelling of the basement, transported upstairs into the warm Buenos Aires night.

The cocktails on the rooftop menu are drawn from the same programme as the main bar — Atlantic immigration narratives expressed through South American spirits and European techniques — but supplemented with a small number of rooftop-specific drinks that use the garden's produce directly. The house gin (Atlántico, which the bar distils itself) is the thread through every section of the menu, and the rooftop G&T using it — with local tonic, fresh herbs from two feet away, and a strip of lemon peel — is the perfect arrival drink for a Buenos Aires summer evening.

07 / 08

Doppelgänger Bar — Upper Deck

San Telmo Mezcal / Agave $$ 8pm–3am

San Telmo is Buenos Aires's oldest neighbourhood, a cobblestoned grid of 19th-century buildings that the city's art community colonised in the 1980s and has occupied with increasing density ever since. Doppelgänger — a bar whose name references the European immigrant duality that defines so much of Buenos Aires's cultural character — operates across three levels of a converted colonial townhouse, with the upper deck serving as a terrace that looks across the San Telmo rooftops toward the Río de la Plata on clear nights.

The speciality is agave spirits — mezcal and tequila with a depth and range of selection that reflects the bar's location in a city with significant Mexican and Central American immigrant communities. The cocktail list changes quarterly, with one section permanently dedicated to agave classics (the Tommy's Margarita here is made with 100% agave tequila and fresh lime only, no sweet and sour) and another that uses mezcal as a base for cocktails designed around its smokiness. On weekends, a DJ plays in the courtyard below while the terrace maintains a quieter, more conversational atmosphere.

Palermo Hollywood rooftop bar Buenos Aires

08 / 08

Victoria Brown Bar — Terraza

Palermo Hollywood Cocktail Bar $$$ From 6:30pm

Victoria Brown is the kind of bar that looks exactly as good on a Tuesday evening in June as it does on a Saturday in January, which is the mark of a space that was designed for real use rather than seasonal photography. The terraza — a tiled rooftop space in Palermo Hollywood that opens toward the west, meaning sunsets are a feature rather than an afterthought — is perhaps forty seats, laid out in a style that combines the Buenos Aires café tradition (marble-topped tables, woven chairs) with a bar-forward design that keeps the cocktails as the focal point.

The menu changes twice a year and consistently incorporates Argentine botanicals — patagonian herbs, Andean fruits, native berries from the northwest — into cocktails built on international spirits. The whisky sour variation made with a small-batch Argentine malt (from a Mendoza producer that has been distilling for twelve years) and local bitters is a good example: it tastes recognisably like a whisky sour and distinctively like Argentina, simultaneously, which is a difficult effect to achieve and which Victoria Brown manages without comment.

Planning Your Rooftop Evening in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires operates on a schedule that disorients visitors from most other time zones. Dinner begins between 9pm and 10pm. Bars fill between 11pm and midnight. Clubs don't properly begin until 2am. Rooftop bars occupy the golden hour and post-dinner window — roughly 7pm to midnight — and planning around this schedule is essential for experiencing them at their best.

Practical notes for rooftop drinking in BA: Most Buenos Aires rooftops operate year-round with some form of weather protection, but the experience is genuinely different in summer (December–February) when the air is warm enough at midnight to sit outside in a light jacket. Fernet con Coca is available everywhere and costs significantly less than cocktails — there is no shame in ordering it and every local does. Tipping: 10% is standard; no one expects more and no one will notice less if the service was average.

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The Best Rooftop Bars in Buenos Aires

Milión

Gran Bar Danzón

878 Bar — Rooftop

Hotel Madero Sky Bar

El Preferido de Palermo — Azotea

Florería Atlántico — Rooftop Garden

Doppelgänger Bar — Upper Deck

Victoria Brown Bar — Terraza

Planning Your Rooftop Evening in Buenos Aires

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