Alternative Weddings in Buenos Aires: Searching for Your Own Ritual

A while ago, this article was published in Sophia Magazine (illustrated with some of our photos), which talked about alternative weddings and how they have become a trend over the last few years.

Our wedding blog has evolved over time into a source of inspiration and ideas for weddings in general, beyond just the photography. So, taking the article as an excuse, in this post we’ll share (and show you!) TEN alternative weddings we had the pleasure of documenting.

We hope you enjoy them, and don’t forget that you can contact us to let us know how we can help you.

Leti + Antoine – Alternative wedding in a San Telmo mansion + Drag Queens

Leti is a very dear friend of the studio, but she is also a wedding planner; as a savvy organizer and an expert in the wedding world, she took charge of planning her own party, and naturally, she made sure everything was very different and original. Instead of choosing a traditional hall or venue, she searched high and low (and was lucky enough to find) an old, unused historic mansion in the heart of Buenos Aires’ old town. You can see all the photos and the video at this link: Wedding in San Telmo. As if that setting wasn’t enough, she crowned the party with the performance of several Drag Queens who added an (even more) original and unique touch.

Paola + Marco – The union of cultures

Paola and Marco were already legally married because they live in Italy and had already taken care of all the formalities in the old continent. They just needed to celebrate and finish uniting the two cultures; so, they chose an alternative, completely outdoor wedding that featured a little bit of each country: tarantellas, Genoese bread, some spaghetti alla bolognese, mixed with an asado menu, mate and biscuits, and the essential cumbia to close out the day with pure Argentine party style. You can see the full report at this link: Wedding at Estancia Carabassa.

Photos here: Wedding in Cariló

Juana + Paolo – Winery Wedding

Sometimes the alternative is to look for venues or locations outside of the classic options. In this case, the Narbona winery in Punta del Este could not be a better choice to celebrate your wedding in that wonderful setting among vines, wine glasses, oak barrels, vintage cars, and its old colonial structure.

Photos here: Wedding at Bodega Narbona, Punta del Este

Kate + Sara – Buenos Aires, international capital of alternative weddings

Kate and Sara traveled specifically to Buenos Aires to have their own destination equal marriage. They made the most of their trip and split their wedding into several parts: on one hand, they had their civil wedding, but we also went out to the Delta in Tigre, where they had their intimate and personalized ceremony.

Photos here: Destination Equal Marriage

Leti + Juan Cruz – Relaxed, like just out of the SPA

If the dictionary had the term “relaxed wedding,” there should be a photo of Leti and Juan illustrating it (one of ours, of course! 😝)

As the text they chose for their invitation says (you can read it in full in the blog post), Juan and Leti decided from minute zero that they wanted an unconventional event, different, but above all, they wanted it to be an alternative to traditional options. They chose Milion Bar and were able to do everything “however they felt like it.”

Photos here: Relaxed Wedding at Milion Bar

Mica + Hernán – By the seashore

A beach wedding is a bit of a “dream come true.” Mica and Hernán told us they couldn’t find any wedding format in Buenos Aires that quite fit what they were looking for.

Closed banquet halls weren’t an option because of the lack of even a little bit of nature. The outdoor venues they saw didn’t quite convince them for different reasons either. So, by crunching some numbers and especially thinking about what they REALLY liked most, it turned out to be much more viable to invite only the most intimate group, book a few rooms in a small hotel, and ensure a beautiful, full weekend that had everything: sea, a sunset ceremony on the beach, and, of course, the necessary dose of night, dancing, and drinks to make everything turn out just perfect.

Photos here: Beach Wedding

Ceci + Joao – A different kind of wedding ceremony

Finally, we leave you with some photos from Ceci and Joao’s wedding, which was one of the ones that inspired the magazine article. What made it different? The article we’ve copied below tells the story to close this post 😊

Photos of Ceci and Joao here: Wedding with a Different Ceremony

The article by Sofía Almiro Ty for Sophia Magazine:

In recent years, there are more and more couples who, when it comes to getting married, choose alternative weddings and/or celebrations that escape traditional forms and carry a personal and genuine imprint, far from established rituals. Even so, whatever the form, the core remains intact: what persists is the desire to celebrate the commitment and the beginning of a new life together.

“Dream a little dream of me” plays, sung by Ella Fitzgerald. The bride walks hand-in-hand with her father toward where the groom awaits her.

There are no priests, the altar is just an ordinary table, and the master of ceremonies is Chelo, a friend of the bride-to-be. In an old house with a garden (Lowlands Club) in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Belgrano, he tells the guests the story of how Cecilia Arbolave (28) and Joao Varella (29) met—she is Argentine, he is Brazilian. Then, he invites the bride’s sisters and the groom’s brother to read a poem by Khalil Gibran: “You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore. You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days. Ay, you shall be together in the silent memory of God (…) Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” Afterward, the couple—who had already married in a civil ceremony—make ten promises out loud. Cecilia accepts Joao as her husband; Joao accepts Cecilia. Chelo invites those present to declare out loud that they are husband and wife. “We declare you husband and wife!” they obey, enthusiastically. And the couple walks out to music by Harry Nilsson… end of the wedding, the party begins!

Cecilia and Joao’s ceremony, atypical until a few years ago, is just one example of how, more and more, new couples choose to seal their commitment of love in unconventional, less conservative, and more relaxed ways, perhaps tailored to their own expectations and desires, far (though sometimes not that far) from religious traditions or the dictates of a wedding planner.

Ultimately, they are faithful to their style and their deep, authentic desire to pledge their union. Cecilia speaks to this: “What I wanted with my wedding was to celebrate the fact that I could trust a person, bet on a relationship, and take on a commitment.” Jorge Lozano has been marrying people for more than three decades—thirty-two years, to be precise.

He has over ninety thousand couples united by law under his belt. As head of the Civil Registry department of Commune 14 in the City of Buenos Aires, he says there is no significant variation in the number of weddings. “People get married, but it’s trendy to hold weddings in other settings, outside of the Civil Registry. This is thanks to the law passed twelve years ago in the City—which the Province adhered to—that allows for hiring the delivery of the marriage certificate at home. This is what intends to be a ritual.” But, in addition, Lozano mentions that the trend also has to do with the fact that it is common today for the groom to be divorced and for the couple to still want a ceremony to celebrate the union; or that it is an interfaith marriage for which there is no specific ritual; or that one of the two parties may not practice any religion at all. However, replicating the formality of the delivery of the marriage certificate in the space the couple chose for their ceremony requires going through the Civil Registry first. Only afterward can it be reproduced within the framework of the chosen ritual. Perhaps because, as Joseph Campbell, mythologist and specialist in comparative religion, maintains: “The function of ritual is to give form to human life, not as a mere superficial ordering, but also in the depths.”

In December 2011, a couple of Argentines got married with the Atlantic Ocean as a backdrop, on Playa Brava in José Ignacio, Uruguay. Soledad Azarloza (31) and her husband, Luis (35), do not have a religion in common: she is agnostic and he is Jewish. When they decided to get married, they couldn’t find a form that represented both of them, until one day, while they were on vacation in the neighboring country, they found that the beach was the perfect place to resignify their union. They didn’t have the ceremony planned, but they did know they wanted some forms of Jewish tradition to be present, such as breaking the glass or getting married under the Chuppah—a decorated and generally white pergola. After doing arduous research and ending up exhausted from looking at weddings, they decided that three friends would be the ones to marry them and that they would read fragments of the Torah. “Beyond everything, I got married the way I wanted,” says Soledad, “because what we were looking for was to celebrate our partnership; the commitment was assumed, and we wanted to share it with the people we love. It was the prelude to starting our family.”

Maggie Cassalins (35) and Carlos Iturralde (47) belong to practicing Catholic families, but Carlos is divorced, and Catholicism does not allow the sacrament of marriage in these cases.

Besides the civil wedding, they wanted an emotional ceremony. So, they asked Raúl, Carlos’s brother-in-law and very good friend, to serve as master of ceremonies.
Beyond the forms, it was about giving meaning to something deeper and more spiritual: “We wanted to reaffirm that we were going all in together. And by sharing it with all the guests, it took on a greater dimension,” says Maggie. For that day, they chose to read the words of Saint Paul: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”