History

The Confitería del Molino stands at the end of a long commercial tradition on the same corner. By 1850, Constantino Rossi and Cayetano Brenna had established a confectionery near the present site; Brenna’s operation — which eventually took the name “del Molino” after a steam mill (molino) installed nearby — relocated and grew as the neighbourhood around the new National Congress was developed in the late nineteenth century.

In 1915 Cayetano Brenna commissioned the Italian-Argentine architect Francesco Gianotti to design the building that would become the definitive Molino. Gianotti conceived a six-storey Art Nouveau palace with a ground-floor café, upper-floor confectionery and restaurant operations, and a corner tower rising 65 metres above the intersection — its stained glass illuminated from within by electric lighting, and its profile punctuated by decorative windmill sails (the “molino” motif that gave the establishment its name). Construction was completed in 1917, making the Molino one of the tallest buildings in the city at the time of its inauguration.

For eight decades the café functioned as the informal parliament of Argentine political life. Legislators from the building across the street, journalists from the press district, and successive generations of Buenos Aires’ professional class took their coffee and argued the affairs of the nation at its marble-topped tables. The café closed in January 1997 — a casualty of the economic difficulties of the period — and the Argentine Congress declared it a National Historic Monument that same year. A 2014 law expropriated the building and mandated its restoration; work began in 2016 and has been progressing since. In 2026 the building remained closed to casual visitors, with guided tours available by reservation.