Known on the tourist map for its landscapes, tango, wine, beef and football, Argentina has struggled to cement itself as a destination for international travelers. If anything, it has been losing foreign visitors of late.

According to Argentina’s statistics institute INDEC, 3,502 foreign tourists visited Argentina in the first four months of 2026. While that was a 6.5% improvement on the same period of 2025, it marked a sharp drop from the same stretches in 2024 (-20.5%) and 2023 (-19.3%).

Daniel Schteingart, a researcher at the Fundar think tank, told the Herald that “Argentina is one of the few countries in the world that hasn’t managed to grow its tourism exports over the past 15 years.”

“The rest of the world has kept developing tourism and pulling in foreign visitors, but we’re stuck in place. Countries that used to be behind us, like Colombia, are now ahead,” he added.

Laura Vernelli, an economist at the consultancy Equilibra, told the Herald that “the most important relative price for whether foreigners come in or not is the real exchange rate” — in other words, the price of the dollar.

“The moments when the real exchange rate is cheap are the ones that kill foreign tourism, because it gets very expensive for them to stay and live in Argentina,” she said.

She pointed to last year as an example, when “very few people were coming from abroad on........

© Buenos Aires Herald