Mar del Plata's history runs from a Jesuit mission and a saladero to the aristocratic villas of the 1900s, then Perón's mass tourism that gave the ocean to the workers. Three days of chalets, museums, lighthouses and shipwreck ribs tell it.
The 1909 Belle Époque villa of the Ortiz Basualdo family, designed by Louis Dubois in Flemish-Picard style, keeps its original Art Nouveau furniture by Gaudí collaborator Gaspar Homar — the only complete set in the Americas.
Begun 1893 in neo-Gothic style over the chapel of founder Patricio Peralta Ramos, the cathedral has French stained glass, a 1,500-pipe Italian organ and an Austrian chandelier that once hung in Buenos Aires' Teatro Colón.
Built 1904 by Basque businessman Ernesto Tornquist as a medieval-style folly on Punta Piedras, the crenellated tower marks where a legendary monk is said to have kept vigil. Rebuilt after the 1920s storms wrecked its lower terraces.
Holds the pre-Hispanic record of the region: Pampean hunter-gatherer stone tools, guanaco-bone points and megafauna from the Arroyo Seco sites, plus the collection Galileo Scaglia assembled from the cliffs south of the city.
Amancio Williams' 1945 concrete house bridging the Arroyo Las Chacras, built for composer Alberto Williams, is a landmark of Argentine modernism. Gutted by fire in the 1990s and restored as a museum in 2012.
The naval base founded 1949 hosts the submarine force; outside stands the memorial to the 44 crew of the ARA San Juan, lost in November 2017 and found a year later at 900 m depth off Comodoro Rivadavia.
Benito Roverano's 30,000-shell collection, gathered over 60 years across 100 countries, anchors a museum that also tracks Mar del Plata's whaling, sealing and Italian-immigrant fishing history from the 1880s onward.
The 1937 Rationalist complex by Alejandro Bustillo opened as the Casino's theatre wing and hosted the first Mar del Plata International Film Festival in 1954, when Perón made the city Argentina's answer to Cannes.
The 1920s summer house of Emilio Mitre holds the city archive: founder Peralta Ramos' land deeds, photographs of the 1886 railway arrival, the saladero of Portuguese settler Coelho de Meirelles, and posters from the boarding-house boom.
The pine-shaded quarter named for a 1930s log-fronted chalet is where Buenos Aires families built Norman and Tudor summer houses. Villa Silvina was Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares' retreat, where Borges was a regular guest.
Lit in 1891, the 35 m black-and-white banded tower guided ships past the reef that wrecked dozens of vessels. Its French Barbier lens still turns; the keeper's house and the 1900s naval signal station stand in the grounds.
Rusting hulks of the 1950s–70s fishing fleet lie beached beside the southern breakwater — steel trawlers abandoned when the fishery collapsed, their ribs now a rookery. The wreck of the Bahía Aguirre is the largest still visible.