What "porteño" means...

People from Buenos Aires are referred to as porteños (people of the port).


The majority of porteños have European origins, with Italian and Spanish descent being the most common, from the Calabrian, Ligurian, Piedmont, Lombardy and Neapolitan regions of Italy and from the Galician, Asturian, and Basque regions of Spain.

Other European origins include German, Swedish, Dutch, Greek, Irish, Norwegian, Portuguese, French, Russian, Croatian, English and Welsh. In the 1990s there was a small wave of immigration from Romania and Ukraine.[22] There is a minority of old criollo stock, dating back to the Spanish colonial days. The Criollo and Spanish-aboriginal (mestizo) population in the city has increased mostly as a result of immigration, from countries such as Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay, since the second half of the 20th century.

Important Syrian-Lebanese and Armenian communities have had a significant presence in commerce and civic life since the beginning of the 20th century.

The Jewish community in Greater Buenos Aires numbers around 250,000, and is the largest in Latin America. Most are of Northern and Eastern European Ashkenazi origin, primarily Russian, German and Polish Jews, with a significant Sephardic minority, mostly made up of Syrian Jews.

The first major East Asian community in Buenos Aires was the Japanese, mainly from Okinawa. Traditionally, Japanese-Argentines were noted as flower growers; in the city proper, there was a Japanese near-monopoly in dry cleaning. Later generations have branched out into all fields of economic activity. Starting in the 1970s there has been an important influx of immigration from China and Korea.

Since 2004 an increasing number of American and British citizens are moving to Buenos Aires, possibly due to the lower cost of living, many of them opening up businesses and some restaurants have become English-speaking favourites.