Alfonsín's wake is being carried out in the Blue Room of the Senate in the Congress, whereas several hundred people attend the funeral.
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His body will be buried tomorrow at noon at Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires.
Raúl Ricardo Alfonsin was president from 1983 to 1989 and won international admiration for putting on trial and jailing the former military leaders who tortured and killed thousands during the last military dictatorship in Argentina.
In 1989 he completed Argentina's first transfer of power from one elected president to another in decades.
Married and with six children, he was born on March 12, 1927, in Chascomus, a town 75 miles south of Buenos Aires. Former President Alfonsín was the son of an affluent Spanish immigrant shopkeeper and his British wife. He went to military academy but then chose to study law.
An eloquent orator, he rose through the ranks of the Radical Party -the traditional opposition to the powerful Peronists- and was elected to the lower house of Congress in 1963.
