the room's own history
The Building: From Cinema To Tango House
Cerrito 570 held a film screen for decades before it held a stage — what's original, what's since changed, and what's still up there above the curtain.
Check availability ↗The building, in two dates
| As the Cine Metro | As Tango Porteño | |
|---|---|---|
| Opened | 4 October 1956 | later, as a restored tango theatre |
| Built for | the American studio Loew's | a nightly tango production |
| Architect | Alberto Bourdon (Belgian-born) | — |
| What's original | the arched proscenium, the balconies, the relief above the stage | the same features, now lit for a live show |
A cinema built for Loew's
The building at Cerrito 570 opened as the Cine Metro on 4 October 1956, built for Loew's Inc., the American studio behind MGM, at a point when Buenos Aires still had dozens of single-screen picture houses competing for the same downtown audience. It was designed by the Belgian-born architect Alberto Bourdon, whose other Buenos Aires work includes the Art Deco Cine-Teatro Ópera on Avenida Corrientes, built two decades earlier in 1936 — a separate building, easily confused with this one, since both carry Bourdon's design hand and a similar Art Deco vocabulary. Bourdon's two Buenos Aires commissions — this one and the Cine-Teatro Ópera — are easy to conflate in casual writing about the city's cinema history, which is likely why some marketing material misdates this particular building to the 1930s rather than 1956.
What the room looked like as a cinema
In its cinema years, the Cine Metro held about 2,500 people in the stalls and on two balcony levels. Its screen was reported at 20 by 12 metres, built for the age of the grand downtown picture palace. Through the 1980s and 1990s, large single-screen cinemas in central Buenos Aires closed one after another as multiplexes took their audiences. The Cine Metro was first divided into several smaller screens and later shut its doors for good.
Why a cinema, not a purpose-built theatre
Nothing about the room was built with a stage show in mind — the raked stalls, the tiered balconies and the deep proscenium arch were built to frame a screen, not a live orchestra and a dance floor. That's part of what makes the space unusual as a venue: the sightlines, the acoustics and the sheer scale of the room are all cinema-era decisions, repurposed rather than redesigned, for a production that arrived decades after the building did. The building's scale is part of why it suits a large-cast production rather than a small, intimate tango room — the two formats need very different rooms.
What happened after the cinema years
The building's later life is better documented than its interior. The hall was divided into three smaller rooms in 1984, the cinema closed in 2005, and a tango-themed hotel opened in the building in 2009. Plaster reliefs of this kind were a common feature of mid-century Latin American cinema architecture, though the specific figures above this stage — film reels among them — are unusual in referencing cinema directly rather than more generic classical motifs.
From closed cinema to open theatre
The wider building went through a further change in the 2000s, when a hotel group bought the property to convert part of the block into a hotel, leaving the original auditorium as a distinct space within the same building rather than folding it into the hotel itself. The exact year the auditorium reopened specifically as a tango venue isn't published anywhere independently verifiable, so it's worth treating as a restoration some years after the cinema's closure rather than a fixed, sourced date. The hotel conversion nearby means the block today mixes overnight guests with theatre-goers, a combination the original 1956 building, built purely as a cinema, was never designed around.
One address, two very different nights out
The result is a room that reads as neither a purpose-built dinner theatre nor a converted warehouse or courtyard — the two most common shapes for a Buenos Aires tango night. It's a mid-century American-studio cinema, Belgian-designed, that spent the second half of its life running film reels and the more recent years running a live tango production inside the same walls, arches and balconies. Whatever the exact year the tango show began, the building's two identities — cinema, then theatre — sit close enough together in time that visitors sometimes still ask staff whether it's still possible to watch a film there.