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Argentina

4 city guides · Latin America

Cities in Argentina (4)

Latin America
🇦🇷 Argentina

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires (the "Paris of the South" — a claim that is not entirely hyperbole: the Avenida de Mayo (1894, modelled on the Haussmanian boulevard), the café culture, the bookshops, the psychoanalysis culture (Buenos Aires has more psychoanalysts per capita than any other city in the world), and the literary tradition (Borges, Cortázar, Sábato) all reflect a city that has always looked across the Atlantic for its identity) is the cultural capital of Latin America: a city of 3 million in the city proper (15 million in the metro area) where tango was born in the brothels and conventillos of La Boca in the 1880s, where the most passionate football culture in the world (Boca Juniors vs. River Plate — the Superclásico — is the most intense football rivalry on the planet), and where the finest steak on earth (Argentine beef, grass-fed on the Pampas) is eaten at a parrilla at midnight. Buenos Aires is simultaneously European in its architecture and Latin American in its heat — and the combination is irresistible.

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Latin America
🇦🇷 Argentina

Mar Del Plata

Mar del Plata is Argentina's grande dame of beach resorts — a city of one million that swells to five million every January as Buenos Aires empties its middle class onto its 47 km of Atlantic coastline. Founded in 1874 with pretensions of European gentility, it built fin-de-siècle villas, a casino shaped like a Loire château and a rambla promenade that became the backdrop for a century of Argentine literature, cinema and romance. Julio Cortázar summered here; Victoria Ocampo built a villa in Belgrano district; and the International Film Festival, one of Latin America's oldest, runs every November. Beyond the beaches — Bristol, Playa Grande, Punta Mogotes — the port quarter is the city's rougher, more authentic soul: sea lions bask on the breakwaters while fishing boats unload the deepest cold-water hake in the South Atlantic. Mar del Plata also produces dulce de leche alfajores in quantities that could supply a continent.

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Latin America
🇦🇷 Argentina

Rosario

Rosario is Argentina's third-largest city (1.4 million) and the economic capital of the Pampas — the great agricultural heartland of South America — located on the west bank of the Paraná River (the second-largest river system in South America after the Amazon), 300 km north of Buenos Aires. Rosario is the birthplace of the Argentine flag (the Flag of Argentina was first raised here by General Manuel Belgrano on February 27, 1812, on the banks of the Paraná River), the birthplace of Ernesto "Che" Guevara (born in Rosario on June 14, 1928, though the family house has been demolished — a museum exists at the site), and the birthplace of Lionel Messi (born in Rosario on June 24, 1987, who grew up in the Las Heras neighbourhood and trained at the Club Atlético Newell's Old Boys academy). The city is also the grain port of South America — the Paraná-Paraguay waterway is the second-longest navigable waterway in the world, and the Rosario-San Lorenzo complex is the largest grain export complex in the Western Hemisphere (80% of Argentina's soybean exports, 45% of its corn and 30% of its wheat are shipped from the Rosario port complex, making Rosario the agricultural fulcrum of the global food supply). Rosario is known as "the Chicago of the Pampas" for its early 20th-century industrial development and its reputation for political radicalism — Argentina's anarchist and socialist movements of the early 20th century were strongest in Rosario, and the city has a tradition of cultural and political nonconformism that contrasts with Buenos Aires.

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Latin America
🇦🇷 Argentina

Ushuaia

Ushuaia (population 87,000; the southernmost city in the world — officially at 54.8° S latitude, though the Chilean settlement of Puerto Williams (population 2,500) at 54.9° S is technically further south; Ushuaia is the capital of the Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica and the South Atlantic Islands) is universally known as "el fin del mundo" (the end of the world) and sits on the Beagle Channel — the famous waterway named after HMS Beagle, the ship on which Charles Darwin sailed through this exact passage in 1832-1833-1834, documenting the flora, fauna and indigenous peoples (the Yámana (Yahgan) people — the southernmost indigenous people on earth, who inhabited the Beagle Channel islands and the Cape Horn archipelago for at least 10,000 years before European contact, living in the near-freezing temperatures year-round wearing little clothing, insulated by a thick layer of body fat and constant application of seal and penguin fat to their skin) that contributed directly to his theory of evolution. The Beagle Channel (the 240-km-long waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans between Tierra del Fuego and the islands to the south, named by Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy for HMS Beagle in 1832) separates Argentina (to the north) from the Chilean islands of Navarino and Hoste (to the south). Ushuaia is the primary gateway to Antarctica (the vast majority of tourist Antarctic cruises depart from Ushuaia — approximately 80,000 passengers per year; the 2-day Drake Passage crossing to the Antarctic Peninsula is included in all Ushuaia-Antarctica itineraries). The Tierra del Fuego National Park (Argentina's southernmost national park — the terminus of the Pan-American Highway (the road system that runs 30,000 km from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia)) and the penguin colonies of the Beagle Channel islands (the Magellanic penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus) and Gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) colonies accessible by boat from Ushuaia harbour) are the primary day-trip attractions.

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