Saturday Night: The password at the door is Alexandra

THE SPANISH have an admirable habit of going out just when most Anglo-Saxons are kicking off their platforms and slipping under the duvet. In Argentina, they follow the same rules. The way they manage dinner at midnight followed by a night-club at 3am and traffic jams at dawn is simple: they get in a few hours' kip when they come home from work.

The trendy place to go in Buenos Aires for the last year or so, I was reliably informed by my companions, Pablo and Mercedes, is El Dorado. Though it sounds like a Rank leisure facility just off the M1, El Dorado is indeed the crock of gold in the city's otherwise standard club scene. After dinner at Pizza Banana (they're great with names), we took a cab to where the queue forms in Calle Hipolito Yrigoyen. Taxis are one of the remaining bargains in a country which rather cheekily revalued its peso and pegged it one-to-one with the US dollar; dollars 1.16 showed on the meter, and the driver did not expect a tip. 'It's cool,' said Pablo, having dismissed the Joe Pesci-lookalike, swanning up to the door.

Incidentally, if you ever go, just shout 'Alexandra', pronouncing the X as a H, in the ear of the Sinead O'Connor clone on the till. Whoever Alexandra is, she'll save you dollars 20. El Dorado turns from a restaurant into a club at 2am. The diners were just finishing their coffee when a great blast of opera mixed with jungle toms came though the sound system and a remarkable transvestite parade began. Normally - at Madame Jo Jo's in London, for instance - these are campy, pantomime affairs to thrill the Only-here-for-the-queers brigade; dead straight people out for a bit of the other. But some of these girls were cute. Some of these girls were girls.

'This one,' said Mercedes, as a white-skinned model with a perfect bob and pair of shiny shorts swashed along the runway, 'she was in my art class. I think. She may be a boy, though.'

As at any club, there were a few chunky Maradona types in their jeans and button-down shirts (the Latin American equivalent of the Gazza look), checking every girl's bottom in the house, but most of the crowd spilling through the doors by 3am were the teens and twenties fashion-lovers. This being Christmas, they came to dance in their best summer gear: funny bits of rubber, shorts, waistcoats, or anything to let the sweat evaporate as the air thickened.

Buenos Aires had its day in the Teens and Twenties of this century, and obtained a whiff of decadence that still lures tourists this far south. The club's decor is perfectly suited to this end. Inhabiting an old French-style apartment building, it opens out from a narrow lobby into one long, high-ceilinged room, with lighted candles, gold pillars and balconies decorated with Punch and Judy pelmets and curtains.

The walls are decorated with fabrics and silly paintings, and from the green and white polka-dot ceiling hangs the de rigueur disco ball. When it got too hot, friends congregated in the great kitchen at the back and stood about laughing as though at a party in some country house, surrounded by washing-up and old dressers.

They certainly like to play house down there - House music, the clubland Esperanto. Aside from the couple of hours of arm-waving stuff, however, there were concessions to other tastes, with a Prince section and a bit of new jack swing. (There are only 6,000 black people in Argentina, and three of them were there tonight. Round these parts, that qualifies as a statistic.)

By five the trannies had changed into something more comfortable and by six the place was down to the Japanese tourists, a few stragglers and the keen-eyed coke dealer with the string beard, still prowling about in in his cowboy hat and shades (dollars 35 a gram, incidentally; another of those bargains).

The alternative beau monde of Buenos Aires were saying their glamorous goodbyes and getting ready for breakfast. And then for a bit of a lie-in.