Long before European sails came into view, the territory of today's Argentina was a mosaic of peoples with radically different languages, economies and beliefs. Historiographical estimates put the region's Indigenous population at the beginning of the sixteenth century at no more than 300,000 people, spread across at least a dozen large cultural groupings. In the northwest, over the Calchaquí valleys and the Quebrada de Humahuaca, advanced farming and pottery-making societies flourished: the Diaguita, together with the Omaguaca and the Atacama, built cultivation terraces, irrigation systems and fortified pucarás, mastered bronze metallurgy and were incorporated during the fifteenth century into the Inca Tahuantinsuyu, whose Inca Trail still crosses the region.
In the river littoral and the Mesopotamia settled the Guaraní, branches of the great Tupí-Guaraní stock that had arrived from Amazonia, growers of maize and cassava whose language survives today in the everyday speech of the northeast. In the central sierras of Córdoba and San Luis lived the Comechingón and the Sanavirón, who inhabited semi-underground dwellings; in the Cuyo region, the Huarpe practiced irrigation farming. The pampa plains were the territory of the Querandí, hunters of guanaco and rhea, while the Chaco was peopled by the fierce Guaycurú peoples.
Towards the south, Patagonia was the domain of the Tehuelche, tall nomadic hunters who astonished the European chroniclers, and Tierra del Fuego was home to the Selk'nam or Ona, the Yámana and the Kawésqar, societies of hunters and canoe people adapted to the southernmost climate on the continent. From the eighteenth century onwards, Mapuche peoples coming from present-day Chile spread across the pampa and northern Patagonia in a process known as araucanization, taking up the horse and transforming life on the plains. This diverse universe was no passive backdrop: many of these peoples resisted for centuries, and their agricultural, textile, pottery and linguistic legacy is still alive in contemporary Argentine culture.
The first European to venture into the Plata estuary was Juan Díaz de Solís in 1516, killed shortly afterwards by the Indigenous people of the shore. In 1536 Pedro de Mendoza raised a first, short-lived settlement of Buenos Aires that hunger and attacks forced him to abandon within a few years; the city had to be founded again for good only in 1580, at the hands of Juan de Garay. Throughout that period the Atlantic gateway was marginal, and the real colonization came from the opposite end: coming down from Upper Peru and the silver of Potosí, and crossing the mountains from Chile, the conquistadors founded the inland cities that would be the populated heart of the country for two centuries.
Santiago del Estero, established in 1553 by Francisco de Aguirre, is the oldest city still standing in Argentine territory and earned the title of "Mother of Cities": from it set out the expeditions that founded San Miguel de Tucumán (1565), Córdoba (1573), Salta (1582), La Rioja (1591), San Salvador de Jujuy (1593) and San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca (1683). From the west, settlers coming from Chile founded Mendoza (1561), San Juan (1562) and San Luis (1594), making up the region of Cuyo. Córdoba would become a cultural center of the first order with the creation, by the Jesuits, of the country's oldest university in 1613.
The conquest was neither a peaceful nor a straightforward process. In the Calchaquí valleys, the Diaguita mounted a ferocious resistance that lasted more than a century, in the so-called Calchaquí Wars, until their defeat and mass deportation in the middle of the seventeenth century. The encomienda system subjected the Indigenous population to forced labor, while the Guaraní Jesuit missions of the northeast —today a World Heritage Site at San Ignacio Miní and other reductions— were trying out a singular model of evangelization and communal organization until the expulsion of the Society of Jesus in 1767. Under the Habsburgs, the present-day Argentine territory was divided between the Governorate of Tucumán and that of the Río de la Plata, both subordinate to the distant Viceroyalty of Peru, in a subsistence economy geared to supplying the Upper Peruvian mines.
The eighteenth century brought a change of dynasty in Spain —the Bourbons— and with them a vast program of reforms meant to modernize and centralize the imperial administration. In that framework, on August 1, 1776 King Charles III created, first provisionally and then permanently in 1777, the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, with its capital in Buenos Aires. The measure, driven by his Secretary of the Indies José de Gálvez, answered to geopolitical and economic reasons: to hold back the Portuguese advance from Colonia del Sacramento and Brazil, and to bring order to the growing trade of the South Atlantic.
The new viceroyalty brought under a single jurisdiction territories that today correspond to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, including the immensely rich mining region of Upper Peru and its Audiencia of Charcas. Pedro de Cevallos was the first viceroy, and his expedition drove the Portuguese out of key positions. In 1782 the crown reorganized the territory into eight intendancies, seeking a more efficient administration and stricter fiscal control over the colonies.
The most far-reaching effect was the rise of Buenos Aires. Until then a smuggling village with its back to the empire, the port city became the political and commercial head of the region. The Free Trade Regulation of 1778 opened its port to direct exchange with Spain, and a powerful class of great merchants took hold as the economic elite. That prominence of Buenos Aires fed tensions with the interior and with the peninsular authorities, and helped forge a local identity and local interests that, three decades later, would crystallize in the revolutionary movement. The English Invasions of 1806 and 1807, repelled by criollo militias with hardly any help from the metropolis, gave those criollos an awareness of their own strength and sowed the seed of autonomy.
The crisis of the Spanish monarchy after the Napoleonic invasion of 1808 —with Ferdinand VII a captive and the Supreme Central Junta dissolved— was the trigger. Between May 18 and 25, 1810, in Buenos Aires, a succession of open cabildos and popular pressure led to the removal of Viceroy Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros and the formation of the Primera Junta of government. It was chaired by Cornelio Saavedra, head of the Patricios regiment, and included among others Manuel Belgrano, Mariano Moreno and Juan José Castelli. Formally the new government went on swearing loyalty to Ferdinand VII —the so-called "mask of Ferdinand"—, but in practice the process of emancipation had begun.
The break with Spain opened a long and bloody war of independence. The patriots won at Suipacha at the end of 1810, but failed in their attempts to control Upper Peru. Manuel Belgrano, creator of the national flag in 1812, led the Army of the North and triumphed at the battles of Tucumán (1812) and Salta (1813). On July 9, 1816, in the middle of the war and with much of the continent still under royalist control, the Congress meeting at San Miguel de Tucumán declared the independence of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, breaking every tie with the Spanish crown.
The decisive figure of the emancipation was José de San Martín. Convinced that the enemy had to be beaten at its center of power —Lima—, he planned from Mendoza the boldest of operations. Between January 12 and February 8, 1817 his Army of the Andes, some 4,000 regular soldiers and 1,200 militiamen with thousands of mules and horses, crossed the cordillera through several passes over 4,000 meters high, in a logistical feat comparable to those of Hannibal or Napoleon. The victory at Chacabuco freed Chile, and the campaign continued by sea to Peru, where San Martín proclaimed independence in 1821. His historic meeting with Simón Bolívar at Guayaquil in 1822, and his later withdrawal, closed the cycle of South American independence.
Once independence was won, the hardest part remained: building a state. For decades, the old provinces of the viceroyalty could not agree on what shape to give the country, and the question turned into a long and ferocious clash between two projects. The Unitarians, based in Buenos Aires and in the enlightened elite, defended a strong central government and an economy open to trade with Europe. The Federalists, supported by the caudillos of the interior and the littoral, demanded provincial autonomy and protection for the regional economies. The failure of the Unitarian Constitution of 1826 and the murder of the Federalist governor Manuel Dorrego in 1828 set the civil war alight.
Out of that chaos emerged the dominant figure of the first half of the century: Juan Manuel de Rosas, rancher and Federalist caudillo, governor of Buenos Aires between 1829 and 1832 and again from 1835 to 1852. Rosas governed with the sum of public power and handled the foreign relations of the Argentine Confederation, imposing an order based on personal loyalty, the crimson red of the Federalists and the repression of his opponents through the Mazorca. Under his rule the country withstood the French and Anglo-French blockades of the Río de la Plata, defending national sovereignty, while many Unitarian intellectuals —Sarmiento, Alberdi, Echeverría, Mármol— wrote from exile in Chile and Montevideo the founding works of Argentine literature and thought.
The Rosas regime ended up colliding with the ambitions of his own allies. Justo José de Urquiza, powerful governor of Entre Ríos, rose against Rosas and organized the so-called Ejército Grande, a coalition that gathered forces from Brazil, Uruguay and the littoral provinces of Corrientes and Santa Fe, along with the exiled Unitarians. On February 3, 1852, at the battle of Caseros —the largest in Argentine history, with some 50,000 combatants in all—, Rosas was defeated and had to go into exile in England, where he died. Caseros was not the end of the conflicts, but it opened for the first time a real path towards the constitutional organization of the country.
After the fall of Rosas, Urquiza called the provinces together through the Agreement of San Nicolás and convened a General Constituent Congress in Santa Fe. On May 1, 1853 the National Constitution was enacted, inspired by the ideas Juan Bautista Alberdi set out in his Bases, adopting a representative, republican and federal form of government, with separation of powers, individual liberties and strong encouragement of immigration and foreign investment. Thirteen of the fourteen provinces approved it, but Buenos Aires, jealous of its customs revenue, refused to sign and separated from the rest for almost a decade, giving rise to two opposing states.
Unity was settled by arms and by negotiation. The battle of Cepeda (1859) and above all that of Pavón (1861), where Bartolomé Mitre prevailed over Urquiza, allowed Buenos Aires to rejoin and the country to be definitively unified under the amended Constitution. There opened then the period of the so-called founding presidencies: Mitre (1862-1868), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1868-1874) and Nicolás Avellaneda (1874-1880). Sarmiento, author of Facundo and apostle of public education, promoted schools, railways and the first national census; Mitre organized the institutions and the federal judiciary.
This period was also marked by tragic episodes. The War of the Triple Alliance (1865-1870), in which Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay fought against the Paraguay of Francisco Solano López, dragged on for five years despite Mitre's initial optimism and left Paraguay devastated, with the death of an enormous proportion of its population. The soldiers who returned from that front brought yellow fever with them, which in 1871 ravaged Buenos Aires and killed close to fifteen percent of its inhabitants. On this period of institutional consolidation, not free of shadows, the great modernizing leap of the following decades would be built.
The arrival of Julio Argentino Roca at the presidency in 1880, under the motto "Peace and Administration", opened the long predominance of the so-called Generation of '80: a liberal, secular and modernizing elite that governed the country for decades through the National Autonomist Party. Buenos Aires was federalized as the capital that same year, putting an end to the old disputes over the port city. This generation's project had a clear economic basis: to insert Argentina into the world market as a great supplier of meat, grain and wool for the industries and the tables of Europe.
That agro-export model transformed the country. British capital financed a dense railway network —one of the most extensive in the world— that opened the interior to export and converged like a fan on the port of Buenos Aires; telegraph lines were laid, meat-packing plants and grain elevators were built, and the humid pampa became the engine of one of the fastest-growing economies on the planet. By 1913 Argentina ranked among the ten countries with the highest income per capita in the world, and Buenos Aires was filling up with theaters, avenues and palaces that earned it the nickname "the Paris of South America".
The human fuel of that growth was mass immigration. Encouraged by the law of 1876 and by the Constitution itself, between 1880 and 1930 Argentina received millions of Europeans —above all Italians and Spaniards, but also French, Germans, Syrian-Lebanese, Jews from Eastern Europe, Welsh and Poles—. According to the census of 1914, close to 30 percent of the population was foreign, the highest proportion in the world, and in cities such as Buenos Aires immigrants came to be the majority. Out of that melting pot were born lunfardo, tango, a mestizo cuisine and much of Argentine urban identity. But the model had its dark side: to expand the agricultural frontier, between 1878 and 1885 the state carried out the Conquest of the Desert, a military campaign that subdued and in many cases exterminated the Indigenous peoples of the pampa and Patagonia, distributed their lands among great landowners and displaced or enslaved the survivors.
The political order of the Generation of '80 was prosperous but exclusionary: the vote was cast in public, with widespread fraud and a "spoken vote" controlled by local caudillos, so that power circulated within a narrow elite. Against that regime there arose, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR), a movement of the urban middle classes and excluded sectors that demanded clean elections and went as far as organizing armed uprisings. Social pressure and the fear of an explosion led President Roque Sáenz Peña to push through a historic reform.
In February 1912 Congress passed the Sáenz Peña Law, which established universal, secret and compulsory suffrage for males of age. The reform put an end to the traditional fraud and enormously widened electoral participation. Its first great effect came in 1916, when the UCR won the first elections held under the new system and Hipólito Yrigoyen reached the presidency. So opened a stage of three Radical presidencies: Yrigoyen's first (1916-1922), that of Marcelo T. de Alvear (1922-1928) and Yrigoyen's second (1928-1930).
The Radical governments promoted labor laws, the university reform of 1918 —born in Córdoba and enormously influential throughout Latin America— and a more independent foreign policy, although they also faced harsh social conflicts, violently repressed in episodes such as the Tragic Week of 1919 and the Patagonian strikes. The democratic experience was abruptly cut short on September 6, 1930, when a military coup headed by General José Félix Uriburu overthrew Yrigoyen. It was the first coup d'état of the Argentine twentieth century and opened the so-called Infamous Decade (1930-1943), marked by the return of the conservatives through electoral fraud, the signing of controversial trade agreements with Great Britain and a corruption that gave the period its name.
The military coup of 1943 that put an end to the Infamous Decade brought to the fore a little-known colonel, Juan Domingo Perón, who from the Secretariat of Labor and Welfare built a base of support among workers through labor laws, collective agreements and unprecedented social rights. His rise alarmed the conservative sectors and his own comrades in arms, who arrested him in October 1945. The answer was a massive workers' mobilization: on October 17, 1945, crowds of workers marched to the Plaza de Mayo to demand his release, a day that Peronism would enshrine as its act of birth. Months later, in 1946, Perón won the presidential elections.
The two Peronist governments (1946-1955) transformed Argentine society to its core under the banner of social justice, economic independence and political sovereignty, the three pillars of Justicialism. The railways and public utilities were nationalized, the country was industrialized, labor rights such as the aguinaldo bonus and paid holidays were extended, and access to health care, education and housing was broadened. The central figure of that epic was Eva Perón, Evita, who channelled social aid through her Foundation and led the winning of a decisive right: on September 23, 1947 the women's suffrage law was passed, and in 1951 Argentine women voted for the first time. Evita died of cancer in 1952, at the age of 33, turned into a popular myth.
Peronism was also a divisive and, in many respects, authoritarian phenomenon: it harassed the press and the opposition, strained its relationship with the Church and polarized society between Peronists and anti-Peronists, a "rift" that would mark national politics for generations. The outcome was violent: on June 16, 1955 navy aircraft bombed the Plaza de Mayo full of civilians, and on September 16 of that year a military coup that called itself the Revolución Libertadora overthrew Perón, who left for a long exile. The new regime banned Peronism and even forbade naming it, but far from erasing it, it turned it into a tenacious identity that would survive underground for eighteen years and would go on being the most powerful force in Argentine politics up to the present day.
The three decades after the fall of Perón were a pendulum of chronic instability. Weak civilian governments, elected with Peronism banned, alternated with military coups: Frondizi (1958) and Illia (1963) were overthrown, and in 1966 General Juan Carlos Onganía installed the self-styled Argentine Revolution. Social unrest exploded in 1969 in the Cordobazo, a workers' and students' insurrection in Córdoba, and political conflict grew more radical with the appearance of guerrilla organizations. Perón returned from exile and came back to the presidency in 1973, but died in July 1974, leaving the government in the hands of his widow, María Estela Martínez de Perón, "Isabelita", in the middle of an economic crisis and an escalation of political violence with the para-police Triple A.
On March 24, 1976 the Armed Forces staged a fresh coup and set up a civil-military dictatorship that called itself the National Reorganization Process, with General Jorge Rafael Videla as its first de facto president. It was the bloodiest dictatorship in Argentine history. The regime carried out a systematic plan of state terrorism: kidnappings, torture in hundreds of clandestine detention centers such as the ESMA, executions, the theft of babies from detained women and the forced disappearance of people. Human rights organizations put the number of disappeared symbolically at 30,000. Against that horror rose the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who demanded to know of their children and grandchildren as they circled the square with their white headscarves.
Economically, the dictatorship applied policies that sent foreign debt soaring and deindustrialized the country. Worn down by the crisis and by international denunciations, the junta headed by Leopoldo Galtieri looked for a way out in nationalism: on April 2, 1982 it landed troops on the Malvinas Islands, in British hands since 1833. The Malvinas War against the United Kingdom ended on June 14, 1982 with the Argentine surrender and the death of 649 soldiers, many of them young conscripts. The defeat sealed the fate of the regime: between military discredit, economic catastrophe and massive popular protests, the dictatorship was forced to call elections and to begin its retreat.
On October 30, 1983 Argentines elected as president the Radical Raúl Alfonsín, who took office on December 10 and opened the longest and most stable democratic period in the country's history. His government took a decision without precedent in Latin America: to put on trial those responsible for state terrorism. The CONADEP commission gathered the testimonies that gave rise to the Nunca Más report, and in 1985 the historic Trial of the Juntas sentenced the dictatorship's top leaders, among them Videla and Massera, to life imprisonment. Military pressure, however, forced through the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, which limited the reach of justice. Alfonsín's government foundered in a devastating hyperinflation that in 1989 obliged him to hand over power ahead of schedule.
He was succeeded by the Peronist Carlos Menem (1989-1999), who applied a neoliberal turn: he privatized public companies, opened up the economy and in 1991, with the Convertibility plan of his minister Domingo Cavallo, pegged the peso to the dollar at a "one to one" parity that defeated inflation but at the price of growing debt, unemployment and deindustrialization. The model collapsed under the government of Fernando de la Rúa: in December 2001, the freezing of bank deposits known as the "corralito" set off protests, looting and a repression that left dozens dead. De la Rúa resigned and fled the Casa Rosada by helicopter; the country had five presidents in a few days, declared the largest sovereign debt default in history and abandoned convertibility, sinking into the worst social crisis in its history, with poverty touching half the population.
Out of that abyss a new stage emerged. Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and then his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015) governed for twelve consecutive years, favored by the commodities boom: they restructured the debt, drove economic recovery and consumption, and forcefully revived the trials for crimes against humanity after the annulment of the impunity laws, convicting hundreds of repressors. They were followed by the center-right presidency of Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), the return of Peronism with Alberto Fernández (2019-2023) —marked by the COVID-19 pandemic— and, in a historic turn, the election in 2023 of the libertarian Javier Milei. In the field of memory and also of sport —with the World Cup glories of 1978, 1986 and 2022—, twenty-first-century Argentina goes on wrestling with its old paradox: a country of enormous wealth and talent, cut through by recurring economic crises and by a passionate identity in permanent debate with itself.
The 24 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Buenos Aires was founded twice. The first time, in 1536, by the adelantado Pedro de Mendoza, who named the site Santa María del Buen Ayre; that first settlement, besieged by hunger and by attacks from the Querandí, was abandoned around 1541, and its inhabitants fell back towards Asunción. The definitive founding was carried out by Juan de Garay on June 11, 1580, coming down from Paraguay, under the name Ciudad de la Santísima Trinidad y Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires.
For almost two centuries, Buenos Aires was a poor, peripheral village of the Spanish Empire, shut out of the official trade that flowed through Lima and Upper Peru. It lived in good measure off smuggling through its port on the Río de la Plata. Everything changed in 1776, when the crown chose it as capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, opening it to Atlantic trade and turning it, within a few decades, into the most dynamic city in the south of the continent.
Buenos Aires's new prominence placed it at the center of history. In 1806 and 1807, its criollo militias repelled the two English invasions on their own, without help from Spain; that military and political experience kindled the awareness that the porteños could govern themselves. When news arrived of the fall of the Spanish crown before Napoleon, on May 25, 1810 an open cabildo removed the viceroy and formed the Primera Junta of government: the May Revolution, the starting point of the independence process in the Río de la Plata.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the city was the epicenter of power and of the conflict between the porteño 'head' —owner of the customs house and the port— and the provinces of the interior. It was the capital of governments and a protagonist of civil wars, seat of Rosas and later of those who defeated him, in a tug of war that would define the very shape of the country.
The long dispute between Buenos Aires and the provinces was settled in 1880. That year, with Nicolás Avellaneda as president, the city of Buenos Aires was federalized: it was placed under national jurisdiction and turned into Capital of the Republic, separated from the province of the same name. The porteño governor Carlos Tejedor took up arms against the measure and was defeated; from then on, Buenos Aires ceased to be a provincial capital and became the exclusive seat of the national government.
For more than a century, the city was governed by a mayor appointed by the president of the Nation: it did not elect its own authorities. Full political autonomy came only with the constitutional reform of 1994, which recognized it as an autonomous city with its own government; its first Organizational Statute, in 1996, gave it its current name of Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires and allowed the porteños to elect their head of government for the first time.
Between 1880 and 1930, Buenos Aires received the largest wave of immigration in its history: Italians, Spaniards, Jews from Eastern Europe, Syrian-Lebanese, French, Germans and many others filled the conventillos of San Telmo, La Boca, Balvanera and Barracas and transformed the speech, the cooking and the music of the city forever. Out of that ferment of outskirts, immigrants and orilleros came lunfardo, and came tango, that melancholy music and dance of the Río de la Plata which, after conquering Paris, is today declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by Unesco (2009).
With the wealth of agricultural exports, the city filled with avenues, theaters and French-style palaces that earned it the nickname 'the Paris of South America': the Teatro Colón, the Avenida de Mayo, the Palacio del Congreso, the Obelisco. Neighborhoods such as La Boca, with its Caminito street and the Boca Juniors stadium, and Recoleta, with its famous cemetery where Eva Perón rests, became icons recognized around the world.
Buenos Aires was the great stage of the events that marked Argentine history in the twentieth century. On October 17, 1945, an enormous workers' mobilization packed the Plaza de Mayo to demand the release of Juan Domingo Perón, the founding day of Peronism. In June 1955, naval aviation bombed that same Plaza de Mayo in an attempted coup against Perón that left hundreds dead among the civilian population, a prelude to his overthrow months later.
During the last dictatorship (1976-1983), the city was a center of repression and also of resistance: in the Plaza de Mayo the Madres began circling the square in 1977, demanding answers about their disappeared children, and there operated the ESMA, today a memory site and World Heritage Site. Buenos Aires was also the epicenter of the crisis of December 2001, with its cacerolazos and its social explosion. Each of those episodes left its mark on the streets, the squares and the collective memory of the city.
Across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Buenos Aires consolidated its role as the great cultural capital of Latin America. It was named World Book Capital by Unesco in 2011 and is famous for its extremely dense network of bookshops —among them the monumental El Ateneo Grand Splendid, a former theater—, its notable cafés, its theaters along Avenida Corrientes, its museums such as MALBA and the Bellas Artes, and an intense artistic, publishing and musical life in dialogue with the porteño tradition of Borges, Cortázar, Gardel and Piazzolla.
Today the Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires is the richest and most densely populated district in the country, with close to three million inhabitants within its limits and more than fifteen million in its metropolitan area. It is the main political, financial, university, tourist and cultural center of Argentina, and the gateway through which most travelers discover the country.
Before the Spanish arrived, the enormous plain of Buenos Aires was inhabited by hunter-gatherer peoples: the Querandí around the Río de la Plata and the Pampa peoples —northern Tehuelche— inland. They were nomadic groups who lived from hunting guanaco and rhea, from fishing and gathering, and who moved across the plain without building permanent villages. The introduction of the horse by the Spanish turned them, within a few generations, into formidable riders who dominated the pampa for centuries.
That Indigenous frontier, pushed south and west, shaped much of the history of Buenos Aires until well into the nineteenth century. Later, Mapuche groups also arrived from the cordillera, and the mixing of Indigenous people, criollos and enslaved Africans gradually gave shape to the figure of the gaucho, the free horseman of the countryside who would become a national symbol.
The first attempt at a European settlement on the estuary was the fort of Santa María del Buen Ayre, founded by Pedro de Mendoza in 1536 and abandoned a few years later because of hunger and the attacks of the Querandí. The definitive refounding of Buenos Aires was carried out by Juan de Garay on June 11, 1580. For two centuries the countryside surrounding the city was an open frontier, stocked with enormous herds of feral cattle that, multiplying ownerless across the pampa, gave rise to the wealth —and the myth— of the gaucho.
Out of that abundance of livestock came the first colonial businesses: hides, tallow and jerked beef. Ranches, staging posts and pulperías gradually dotted a vast and thinly peopled countryside, while the port city grew with its back to the interior, more attentive to Atlantic trade —often contraband— than to the provinces upriver.
With the May Revolution of 1810 and independence in 1816, Buenos Aires stood at the center of power and of conflict. The province was the great stage of the confrontation between Unitarians, who wanted a strong central power headed in Buenos Aires, and Federalists, who defended provincial autonomy. The dominant figure was Juan Manuel de Rosas, rancher and governor of Buenos Aires, who between 1829 and 1852 exercised an almost absolute power over the province and, in fact, over much of the country, until he was defeated by Justo José de Urquiza at the battle of Caseros in 1852.
The tension between the port city and the rest of the country ran through the whole nineteenth century. Buenos Aires even went so far as to separate from the Confederation between 1852 and 1861, until it rejoined after the battle of Pavón. The underlying dispute —who controlled the customs house and the port, the main source of wealth— was not resolved until the federalization of the city in 1880.
In 1880 the city of Buenos Aires was federalized and separated from the province to become the capital of the Republic. Governor Carlos Tejedor opposed the move by force of arms and was defeated. The province, deprived of its historic seat, had to build a new capital from scratch. So was born La Plata, founded by governor Dardo Rocha on November 19, 1882 on the hills of Ensenada, following a rationalist urban plan by the engineer Pedro Benoit: a perfect grid crossed by diagonals, with squares every six blocks and a monumental axis of public buildings.
The city was planned as a utopia of positivist progress and won awards at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889 in the categories of 'City of the Future' and best constructed work. La Plata established itself as the seat of provincial power and as a great university center, with the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, and with landmarks such as its neo-Gothic cathedral, the Museum of Natural Sciences and the Observatory.
Between 1880 and 1930, the pampa of Buenos Aires became the engine of agro-export Argentina. The railway, wire fencing, the windmill, the meat-packing plant and the port connected its ranches with European markets, and the province produced the meat and cereals that made the country the 'breadbasket of the world'. Millions of immigrants —above all Italians and Spaniards— settled in the countryside and in the cities, filling farming colonies and towns of smallholders.
In the twentieth century, above all from Peronism onwards (1946-1955), the belt surrounding the Federal Capital —the conurbano bonaerense— became industrialized and filled with enormous contingents of workers arriving from the interior of the country and from neighboring countries. San Antonio de Areco became the symbolic capital of gaucho tradition and of the cult of Martín Fierro, while cities such as Bahía Blanca, Tandil, Luján —with its great basilica and its pilgrimage— and Chascomús grew as regional hubs. Today the province of Buenos Aires concentrates close to 38% of the national population and is, by far, the one with the greatest economic and political weight in the country.
In the twentieth century, Buenos Aires developed the most popular tourist destination in Argentina: the Atlantic Coast. Mar del Plata, 'La Feliz', was born at the end of the nineteenth century as an exclusive seaside resort for the Buenos Aires aristocracy, with its promenades, chalets and the emblematic casino and hotel designed by Alejandro Bustillo. Mass tourism and, above all, the social tourism promoted by Peronism democratized it, turning it into the summer capital of the country. Around it flourished Villa Gesell —founded by the pioneer Carlos Gesell on forested dunes—, Pinamar, Cariló, Necochea, Miramar and dozens of resorts that receive millions of Argentines every summer.
Inland, the Tandilia and Ventania hill ranges —with Tandil and Sierra de la Ventana— offer a landscape of ancient sierras, streams and ranches that contrasts with the plain. Reserves such as Otamendi and historic sites such as Carmen de Patagones, the head of the southern frontier in the nineteenth century, complete a province of enormous diversity: pampa, sierra, sea and a vast urban-industrial conurbano around the great capital.
The territory of Catamarca was one of the great centers of the farming and pottery cultures of northwestern Argentina. For millennia, its valleys were inhabited by peoples who developed an advanced agriculture of terraces and irrigation, a remarkable bronze metallurgy and pottery of the highest quality. From those roots came cultures such as Condorhuasi, Ciénaga and, above all, La Aguada (roughly between the sixth and tenth centuries), famous for its feline iconography and its artistic refinement. Around the year 850-900 the Diaguita identity took shape, bringing together the Kakán-speaking Pazioca.
In the fifteenth century the region was incorporated into Collasuyo, the southern sector of the Inca empire, which left its mark in roads, tambos and high-altitude shrines. Sites such as the Pucará de Aconquija or the ancient settlements of Antofagasta de la Sierra bear witness to that deep pre-Hispanic occupation, one of the richest in Argentina.
The Spanish conquest of the northwest was neither swift nor peaceful. The Diaguita put up one of the most tenacious and prolonged resistances in all of Spanish America: the so-called Calchaquí Wars, a succession of uprisings that stretched, with intervals, between 1560 and 1667. The Calchaquí valleys —shared by Catamarca, Salta and Tucumán— were the stage of those wars, led by chiefs who united the peoples of the valley against the colonial advance.
The resistance ended in 1667 with the final defeat of the last Pazioca lordships. The crown responded with the desnaturalización: entire communities were uprooted by force and moved far from their lands to break their cohesion. That forced uprooting marked the end of the autonomous Diaguita world, although their blood and their culture survive in the present-day population of Catamarca.
The capital city, San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca, was founded in 1683 by Fernando de Mendoza y Mate de Luna, after several relocations of earlier settlements in the region of the Catamarca valley. Colonial life revolved around the agriculture of the valleys —vines, olives, fruit trees, cotton— and around an intense popular religiosity that would become a mark of identity.
The greatest symbol of that devotion is the Virgen del Valle, one of the most venerated Marian devotions in northern Argentina, whose image dates back to the seventeenth century. Its festival and its mass pilgrimages, especially those of Holy Week and December, draw the faithful from all over the country every year. Catamarca declared itself an autonomous province in 1821, after the dissolution of the old governorate of Tucumán, and throughout the nineteenth century it lived through, like the whole interior, the tensions between Unitarians and Federalists.
A good part of Catamarca is puna: an arid altiplano more than 3,000 meters high, strewn with salt flats, gigantic volcanoes and lagoons where thousand-year-old villages and archaeological sites survive, as at Antofagasta de la Sierra, one of the most remote corners of the country. That high cordillera turned the province into a mining hub of national and international weight. In 1997 Bajo de la Alumbrera began operating, the first great open-pit gold and copper mine in Argentina, active until 2018.
Even more decisive was lithium: in 1998 the Fénix project was inaugurated, in the Salar del Hombre Muerto, a pioneer of lithium production in the country. With world demand driven up by batteries, the salt flats of Catamarca became protagonists of the so-called 'lithium triangle' and attract investment worth millions, not free of environmental debate over water and the impact on the high-altitude communities.
Catamarca is famous for its textile craftwork. The ponchos and fabrics of vicuña and llama fiber, spun and dyed with ancestral techniques, are among the finest in the world, and the tradition of the loom is celebrated every July at the National and International Poncho Festival, in the capital, one of the largest craft fairs in Argentina. To that are added high-altitude winemaking and the famous wines and walnuts of the western valleys.
The heritage of Catamarca combines the natural and the cultural: the Cuesta del Portezuelo and the hill valleys; the Termas de Fiambalá at the foot of the cordillera, a starting point towards volcanoes over six thousand meters; the dates and vineyards of the west; and the archaeological and colonial legacy of Santa María, in the Calchaquí valleys, with its rich Diaguita tradition. It is a province of silences, altitude and deep roots, still little travelled by mass tourism.
For centuries the Chaco was one of the regions least penetrated by the Spanish. Its name comes from a Quechua word said to refer to the abundance of game. It was inhabited —and still is— by Indigenous peoples such as the Qom (Toba), the Wichí, the Moqoit (Mocoví), the Vilela and other groups of hunter-gatherers, fishers and gatherers of the scrubland, adapted to a very harsh environment of dry forest and marshes.
These peoples put up an extremely long resistance. Throughout the colonial period and much of the nineteenth century, the Gran Chaco remained a vast Indigenous frontier that white power could not manage to control, dotted with only a few reductions and forts. That Indigenous autonomy, sustained for three hundred years, makes the Chaco one of the regions where effective conquest arrived latest in all of present-day Argentine territory.
Only at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth did the Argentine state militarily occupy the Gran Chaco, in campaigns sometimes called the 'Conquest of the Green Desert'. The army subdued the Indigenous communities, opened the region to economic exploitation and organized it as the National Territory of the Chaco, governed directly from Buenos Aires, with no political autonomy for its inhabitants.
The capital, Resistencia, was founded in 1878 and became the great urban center of the region. Today it is known as the 'City of Sculptures' for the hundreds of works that decorate its streets and squares, the fruit of its international biennials. The Chaco was finally made a province in 1951, during the first Peronist government, and for a short time was called Provincia Presidente Perón, a name it lost after 1955 when it took its present one.
The economy of the Chaco was built on two pillars. The first was the exploitation of the red quebracho, an extremely hard tree from which tannin was extracted, a key input for tanning hides all over the world. Large companies —among them La Forestal in the neighboring Santa Fe region— felled enormous stretches of forest and set up company towns with very harsh working conditions, until the fall in demand left behind razed woodland and ghost towns.
The second pillar was cotton, which from the beginning of the twentieth century turned the Chaco into the country's great cotton producer and drew criollo settlers and immigrants from Europe and from neighboring countries. That economy of 'white gold' shaped the agrarian landscape and Chaco society. Later, the expansion of soy and other crops transformed the countryside again, with heavy pressure on the native scrubland.
The darkest episode in the history of the Chaco took place on July 19, 1924 at the Napalpí reduction. That year the authorities imposed on Indigenous workers an abusive levy on their cotton production and forbade them to leave the territory in search of better wages, which set off a strike and protests. In response, governor Fernando Centeno organized a repressive operation with more than a hundred police, gendarmes and armed civilians, backed even by an aircraft.
The result was a slaughter: more than two hundred members of the Qom and Moqoit peoples were murdered, including women, the elderly and children, and there were mutilations of the bodies. The event was silenced for decades. Only in 2022 did a truth trial declare that the Napalpí Massacre had been a crime against humanity committed by the state, within a systematic process of violence against Indigenous peoples. Today there is a memorial site there honoring the victims.
The natural heart of the province is the Chaco scrubland, with its dry forest of quebracho and carob trees and a fauna that includes the jaguar, the giant anteater, the tapir and the threatened giant armadillo. Its protected jewel is El Impenetrable National Park, created in 2014 on former ranches to conserve the last great remnant of native forest in the northern Chaco and to reintroduce threatened species, in a conservation venture that is beginning to attract ecotourism.
Today the Chaco combines the strong identity of its Indigenous and criollo peoples with serious environmental challenges tied to deforestation and to the advance of the farming frontier over the scrubland. Its mixed culture is expressed in chamamé, in craftwork, in the food of the scrubland and in a powerful literature: the writer Mempo Giardinelli, born in Resistencia, is one of its celebrated voices, alongside poets and musicians who sing to the scrubland, to the Paraná River and to the heat of the north.
For thousands of years the vast territory of Chubut was the domain of the Tehuelche (Aónikenk), extremely tall nomadic hunters of guanaco and rhea who crossed the Patagonian steppe with their hide tents and who left their mark on rock-art sites. Later, Mapuche groups arriving from west of the cordillera also came to occupy the region in a process of araucanization. This was one of the lands Europeans took longest to penetrate: throughout the colonial period Patagonia remained Indigenous territory, barely grazed by navigators and missionaries.
The name Chubut comes from a Tehuelche word —chupat— said to refer to the winding character of the river that crosses the province. The effective incorporation of this territory into the Argentine state did not come until the Conquest of the Desert (1878-1885), which militarily subjugated the Indigenous peoples of Patagonia and opened the region to colonization and to sheep ranching.
The most singular founding event in Chubut was the arrival of the Welsh settlers. On July 28, 1865, some 153 Welsh disembarked from the sailing ship Mimosa in the Golfo Nuevo, where Puerto Madryn stands today. They were looking for a remote place in which to preserve their language and culture, threatened by English rule in Wales, and for that they chose the far-off lower valley of the Chubut River, where they founded towns such as Rawson —today the provincial capital—, Gaiman and Trelew.
The first years were brutally hard: aridity, floods and unfamiliarity with the terrain nearly finished off the colony. With enormous effort, and with the decisive help of the Tehuelche, who taught them to hunt and to survive, the Welsh developed an ingenious system of irrigation canals that made the valley flower with wheat and cattle. Their legacy —the chapels, the Welsh tea, the surnames, the language still taught today and traditions such as the eisteddfod— survives to this day and spread to the mountains as well, in towns such as Trevelin and Esquel.
Like the rest of Patagonia, Chubut was organized at the end of the nineteenth century as a National Territory, governed from Buenos Aires. Its great economic turning point came on December 13, 1907, when a drilling operation searching for water in the vicinity of Comodoro Rivadavia struck oil: it was the find that opened the Argentine oil era. In 1922, President Hipólito Yrigoyen created YPF (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales) there, the world's first integrated state oil company, and Comodoro Rivadavia became the 'national capital of oil'.
Oil brought workers, wealth and urban growth, and gave the province an energy profile it retains to this day. Chubut finally became a province in 1955, joining the rest of the Argentine provinces on an equal footing after more than half a century as a territory.
The coast of Chubut is home to one of the greatest natural spectacles in Argentina: the Península Valdés, declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1999. Every year, between June and December, its sheltered gulfs become the nursery of the southern right whale, which comes to give birth and raise its calves. Added to this are colonies of elephant seals, sea lions, Magellanic penguins and orcas that practice the famous technique of beaching themselves to hunt. Puerto Madryn and Puerto Pirámides are the base for watching this wildlife, while Punta Tombo holds one of the largest mainland penguin colonies in the world.
This coastal richness turned Chubut into one of the planet's great marine wildlife destinations and into a model of nature tourism that combines conservation with local development.
At the other end of the province, along the Andes, the landscape changes radically: humid forests, deep blue glacial lakes and snow-covered mountains. Los Alerces National Park, also a World Heritage Site (2017), protects thousand-year-old forests of Patagonian alerce or lahuán, trees that can live more than two thousand years and reach colossal heights, true living monuments of Patagonia.
Andean towns such as Esquel, Trevelin, El Hoyo and Lago Puelo, together with the old narrow-gauge railway La Trochita —the 'Old Patagonian Express'—, round out a mountain offering that contrasts with the central steppe and the Atlantic coast. Steppe, sea and mountain thus coexist in one of the largest, most diverse and most spectacular provinces in Argentina.
Long before the Europeans arrived, the present-day territory of Corrientes was home to the Guaraní people, farmers and navigators of the great Paraná and Uruguay rivers who planted cassava and maize, fished in the marshes and moved by canoe through a labyrinth of water and woodland. Groups of other origins lived alongside them as well, but it was the Guaraní imprint that proved decisive and lasting: even today Guaraní is spoken alongside Spanish in many homes and settlements, and in 2004 the province declared it an alternative official language, a unique case in Argentina.
The Guaraní language permeated place names (Iberá, Mburucuyá, Yapeyú), the cooking, popular religiosity and music. That Indigenous substrate, mixed with the Spanish-criollo contribution arriving from Asunción, forged a singular mestizo identity that sets Corrientes apart from the rest of the Litoral and that can still be felt in its sing-song speech and in its devotion to popular saints.
On April 3, 1588, the adelantado Juan de Torres de Vera y Aragón founded the city of San Juan de Vera de las Siete Corrientes, with the help of Alonso de Vera 'el Tupí' and of Hernando Arias de Saavedra (Hernandarias). The name refers to the seven points of land, or currents, that the Paraná River forms in front of the city. The first inhabitants were some 62 criollos and Spaniards who came from Asunción, joined by others arriving from the abandoned Concepción del Bermejo; in the same movement, Indian towns such as Itatí, Santa Ana de los Guácaras and Santa Lucía were born.
During the colonial period Corrientes was a key staging post on the river route between Asunción and Buenos Aires, and its economy was built on cattle raising in the low hills and on the yerba mate trade. To the northeast, on lands that today also form part of Misiones, the Jesuit reductions flourished; their Guaraní leaders sought in the Society of Jesus protection from the encomiendas of the landowners and from the slave-raiding bandeirantes coming from Brazil. That frontier character, between Paraguay, Brazil and the Río de la Plata littoral, marked the province from its origins.
Corrientes was one of the great bastions of Litoral federalism in the civil wars of the nineteenth century. It was part of the Liga del Litoral and of the Confederation, and its relationship with Buenos Aires swung between alliance and armed rupture. The province supplied caudillos and armies to the struggles between Unitarians and Federalists, and suffered invasions and battles on its own soil, alternating between support for and resistance to the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas until his fall at Caseros in 1852.
The most tragic episode came in 1865: the occupation of the city of Corrientes by the troops of the Paraguayan marshal Francisco Solano López was the trigger that dragged Argentina into the War of the Triple Alliance (1865-1870), the bloodiest conflict in South American history. Corrientes became the main theater of the first battles and endured the passage of the armies, looting and loss of life. Already in the twentieth century, provincial political life was dominated by the historic confrontation between the Autonomist and Liberal parties, which for decades defined the particular political culture of Corrientes.
The economy of Corrientes rested historically on cattle raising in the low hills and on the production of yerba mate, tobacco and cotton. The abundance of water —rivers, lagoons and marshes— ended up defining its modern productive profile: today Corrientes is one of the country's largest rice producers and an important citrus hub, above all around towns such as Mocoretá and in the south of the province.
To this add forestry with pine and eucalyptus, which turned the province into one of the main forestry basins in Argentina. Cattle raising remains central, with breeds adapted to the subtropical climate and to the flood-prone fields. That rural, gaucho and riverside rootedness also fed its culture: the correntino recognizes himself in the horse, the cattle, the river and the chamarrita.
From that Guaraní-criollo and rural matrix came two symbols of Corrientes that travelled far beyond the provincial borders. The first is chamamé, music and dance of Guaraní root with European contributions (the accordion, the bandoneón) that expresses the soul of the Litoral like nothing else; in 2020 Unesco declared it Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Its great showcase is the Fiesta Nacional del Chamamé, which every January brings artists and crowds together in the city of Corrientes.
The second is the popular devotion to the Gauchito Gil, Antonio Mamerto Gil Núñez, whose shrine on the outskirts of Mercedes draws hundreds of thousands of faithful dressed in red every January 8. Added to this is the centuries-old devotion to the Virgen de Itatí, patron saint of the province, and a mestizo religiosity that blends the Christian with the Guaraní. The province also gave the nation famous figures, beginning with the greatest national hero, José de San Martín, born in Yapeyú in 1778.
The natural heart of Corrientes is the Esteros del Iberá, one of the largest freshwater wetlands on the planet, a mosaic of lagoons, floating vegetation islands and grasslands that occupies much of the center of the province. After decades of degradation and poaching, an ambitious conservation project driven by Fundación Rewilding Argentina (heir to the lands donated by the philanthropist Douglas Tompkins) turned old cattle estancias into Iberá National Park and into a great wildlife corridor, reintroducing locally extinct species such as the giant anteater, the pampas deer, the peccary and the red macaw.
The most celebrated milestone was the return of the jaguar: in January 2021 the first individuals born at the reintroduction center on San Alonso island were released, and today there are free-ranging jaguars in the wetland again for the first time in more than seventy years. With its access portals —Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, Cambyretá, San Nicolás— Corrientes established itself as one of the great destinations for ecotourism and wildlife watching in Argentina, adding this natural heritage to jewels such as Mburucuyá National Park.
Before the conquest, the sierras and plains of Córdoba were inhabited by the Comechingones —a farming people who lived in half-buried houses in the mountain valleys— and by the Sanavirones in the northeast. They grew maize, beans and squash, raised llamas and left their mark on the pictographs, mortars and painted rock shelters still visible in the sierras, as in the impressive rock-art complex of Cerro Colorado.
They were peoples of relatively tall stature and abundant facial hair, which caught the attention of the first Spanish chroniclers. Their language and their organization into small chiefdoms shaped a distinctive society, adapted to the mountain environment and to the rivers that run down from the peaks —the same rivers that centuries later would define tourism in Córdoba.
The conquistador Jerónimo Luis de Cabrera, arriving from Peru, founded the city of Córdoba on July 6, 1573, on the banks of the Suquía River, at a spot the Comechingones called Quizquizacate. He named it Córdoba de la Nueva Andalucía, in memory of the Spanish city. Its location proved strategic: halfway between Upper Peru (Potosí) and the Río de la Plata, the city became an obligatory crossing point of commercial and cultural routes.
That central position made Córdoba one of the most important cities of the colonial interior, with strong religious and educational weight. Because of its landlocked condition, it remained tied both to the Andean north and to the Litoral, and it developed an identity of its own, somewhat apart from the porteño axis, which persists to this day in its culture, its humor and its characteristic lilt.
Córdoba was the great center of the Society of Jesus in the Río de la Plata. The Jesuits founded the Colegio Máximo in 1610, which in 1613 gave rise to the University of Córdoba, the oldest in Argentina and one of the first in the Americas. For centuries it was the only university in the country, which earned the city the nickname 'La Docta' —the learned one. To support education economically, the Jesuits set up a remarkable system of productive estancias —Jesús María, Santa Catalina, Alta Gracia, Caroya and La Candelaria—, true rural enterprises with churches, reservoirs and workshops.
That extraordinary ensemble —the Jesuit Block of the city, with its church, the university and the Colegio Monserrat, and the estancias of the interior— was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in the year 2000. Even after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, that educational and architectural legacy went on shaping Córdoba's identity as the intellectual capital of the country.
Córdoba was the cradle of two movements that marked the history of the country and of the continent. On June 21, 1918, the University Reform broke out at its university: the students rose against the authoritarian, clerical government of the institution and demanded autonomy, student co-government, academic freedom and free tuition. The Reform triumphed and radiated across all of Latin America, transforming the public university forever.
In the twentieth century, the city also became a major industrial hub, above all in automobiles and aeronautics, with factories such as IKA-Renault, Fiat and the Fábrica Militar de Aviones, and with a large and combative working class. From that meeting of workers and students came, on May 29, 1969, the Cordobazo: a popular insurrection against the dictatorship of Onganía, triggered by social discontent and by the abolition of the 'sábado inglés'. Led by unions such as SMATA (mechanics) and Luz y Fuerza, the uprising took over the city for days and shook the military regime, becoming a milestone in Argentina's social struggle.
That university and industrial Córdoba lives alongside a festive, dance-hall popular identity. Its most characteristic expression is cuarteto, a cheerful and infectious rhythm born in the province around 1943, the fruit of the fusion of the tarantella, the pasodoble and other contributions of Italian and Spanish immigrants with the working-class stamp of Córdoba. From Cuarteto Leo to Rodrigo 'el Potro' Cabral and La Mona Jiménez —a genuine popular idol—, cuarteto became the soundtrack of generations and a cultural symbol of the province, recognized by Unesco among the living expressions of Córdoba.
To this add the Cordoban humor and lilt, recognizable across the country, and an intense life of festivals that peaks at the Festival Nacional de Folklore de Cosquín, the largest Argentine folk music festival, held every January since 1961.
The Sierras de Córdoba —Grandes, Chicas and de Comechingones— made the province the great destination of Argentine mountain tourism from the early twentieth century, when the railway brought in holidaymakers in search of clean air and highland waters. Villa Carlos Paz with its cuckoo clock, La Falda, La Cumbre, Mina Clavero in the Traslasierra valley, La Cumbrecita and Villa General Belgrano —Central European in feel and famous for its Oktoberfest— receive millions of visitors every year, drawn by the rivers, the climate, the natural swimming spots and the festivals.
Quebrada del Condorito National Park, in the Sierras Grandes, protects the habitat of the Andean condor and the highland grasslands. Alta Gracia adds its Jesuit estancia and the house where Ernesto 'Che' Guevara lived as a child, and Capilla del Monte draws the mystical tourism tied to the Uritorco hill. With all of this, Córdoba is today the country's second province in population and economy, with strong industry, a powerful agricultural sector on the Cordoban pampa and a fully consolidated sierra tourism.
Hemmed in between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, from which it takes its name, Entre Ríos was for centuries a frontier land crossed by Indigenous peoples such as the Charrúa, the Minuane, the Chaná and the Guaraní of the islands. They were hunters, fishers and gatherers, some of them feared warriors, who moved across the ridges, the woodlands and the marshes of this mesopotamia. Its rolling geography of low hills and streams kept the region relatively isolated in colonial times, when it depended first on Santa Fe and later on Buenos Aires.
Cattle raising, introduced early and multiplied across the open fields, defined its economy and forged a strong gaucho culture. With the May Revolution and the wars of independence, Entre Ríos joined the emancipation process and soon became one of the central stages of the federalism of the Litoral, alongside Corrientes and Santa Fe.
Entre Ríos was one of the cradles of Argentine federalism. As early as 1820, the caudillo Francisco 'Pancho' Ramírez proclaimed the short-lived Republic of Entre Ríos, an experiment in autonomous organization against the centralism of Buenos Aires. Over the following decades, the province upheld the federal banner and supplied men and armies to the civil wars that tore the country apart.
That federalism had deep roots in the cattle-raising, riverside structure of the province, in its estancias and in its local caudillos, and it voiced the Litoral's demand for free navigation of the rivers and for a fairer distribution of the revenues of the Buenos Aires customs house. It was in that context of tension between the provinces and the port that the greatest figure in the history of Entre Ríos emerged.
The great figure of Entre Ríos is Justo José de Urquiza, estanciero, governor of the province and federal caudillo. On May 1, 1851, from Concepción del Uruguay, he issued his celebrated Pronunciamiento against Juan Manuel de Rosas, taking back for Entre Ríos the handling of its foreign relations until a constitution should be enacted. The following year, on February 3, 1852, Urquiza defeated Rosas at the battle of Caseros, opening the way to the constitutional organization of the country.
Under his impulse the National Constitution of 1853 was passed, and Urquiza became the first constitutional president of the Argentine Confederation. He turned Entre Ríos into a prosperous, modern province: he promoted education, immigration and agriculture, and left as his legacy the magnificent Palacio San José, his residence-estancia near Concepción del Uruguay, today a national museum. Entre Ríos was also, for a time, the heart of the Confederation, with Paraná as national capital between 1854 and 1861.
In the second half of the 19th century, Entre Ríos received an intense wave of European immigration that transformed its countryside and its society. Swiss, German, French from the Valais and Italian settlers arrived and founded farming colonies such as San José and Villa Elisa. But the most singular chapter was that of the Jewish farming colonies, the first in Argentina, driven from the 1890s onward by Baron Maurice de Hirsch through the Jewish Colonization Association, to settle families fleeing the pogroms of Russia and eastern Europe.
Those colonists gave rise to towns such as Villa Domínguez, Basavilbaso and Carmel, with their synagogues, their schools and their railway stations, and created the celebrated figure of the 'Jewish gaucho', immortalized by the writer Alberto Gerchunoff. That mosaic of communities —Jewish, Swiss, Volga German, Italian— still lives on in the memory and in the landscape of Entre Ríos, with museums and circuits that recover that immigrant epic.
Contemporary Entre Ríos lives to a large extent off its river and thermal nature. Since the late 1990s, drilling into the Guaraní aquifer has brought thermal waters to the surface in towns such as Federación, Concordia, Colón, Villa Elisa and Chajarí, which turned the province into the great capital of Argentine hot-spring tourism, with water parks and resorts that draw visitors from all over the country all year round.
To this are added its fine-sand beaches on the Uruguay River, El Palmar National Park —which protects the imposing yatay palm grove, palms that are almost a living fossil of the Litoral landscape—, and the Carnival of Gualeguaychú, the largest and most spectacular in Argentina, with its comparsas, floats and Brazilian-style feathers. Paraná, the capital, with its waterfront promenade on the river of the same name, and Victoria, with its Benedictine abbey, round out a province given over to water, rest and nature.
Formosa is part of the Gran Chaco, and its territory was for centuries home to Indigenous peoples who still have a strong and living presence today: the Qom (Toba), the Wichí, the Pilagá and other hunter-gatherer groups, fishers of the great rivers and gatherers of the woodland. Its name comes from an old Spanish and Portuguese word, 'formosa', meaning 'beautiful', applied to a bend of the Paraguay River.
Through the colonial period and much of the 19th century, the region remained outside effective state control, a vast Indigenous frontier disputed between Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. Missionary and military attempts barely grazed a territory that remained, in essence, the domain of its Indigenous peoples until well into the independent era.
The fate of Formosa was sealed by a border conflict that followed the War of the Triple Alliance. Paraguay claimed the northern Chaco, and both countries agreed to submit the dispute to the arbitration of the president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes. On November 12, 1878, the Hayes Award ruled in favor of Paraguay over the right bank of the Pilcomayo River, while Argentina consolidated its sovereignty over the lands south of that river, which today make up the province of Formosa.
As a result, Argentina moved its settlement from Villa Occidental —which was left on the Paraguayan side and came to be called Villa Hayes— to the Argentine bank. So in 1879 the city of Formosa was founded, and it became the head town of the new National Territory. The province owes, quite literally, its existence and its capital to that international arbitration.
Under Law 1532 of 1884, the National Territory of Formosa was created, governed directly from Buenos Aires and with no political autonomy for its inhabitants. Its economy historically rested on forestry —quebracho and tannin—, cotton, cattle raising and, later, crops such as rice, bananas and other subtropical fruits. Being a border with Paraguay marked its history, its trade and its culture, with a strong Guaraní influence and an identity bound to the heat, the woodland and the river.
After decades of demands, Formosa became a province on June 28, 1955, during the presidency of Juan Domingo Perón, under Law 14,408, the same one that granted provincehood to several national territories of the north. It is therefore among the youngest provinces in Argentina in institutional terms.
The most tragic episode in the history of Formosa took place in October 1947, at the settlement of La Bomba, near Las Lomitas. Hundreds of families of the Pilagá people had taken work in the sugarcane harvest of the El Tabacal mill, in Salta, but when the time came to be paid the company broke the agreement and the workers were dismissed. On their way back, exhausted and hungry, they gathered at Rincón Bomba, where a protest was organized.
Between October 10 and 30, 1947, Gendarmería troops —backed by an Air Force plane and by the police— brutally repressed the assembled community. The result was a slaughter that left hundreds of Pilagá dead, followed by persecutions and forced removals. The event was silenced for more than half a century, until in 2019 the federal courts of Formosa declared it a crime against humanity and a genocide against the Pilagá people.
Formosa keeps some of the best preserved natural environments in Argentina. Its jewel is the Bañado La Estrella, the second largest wetland in the country, formed by the overflow of the Pilcomayo River north of Las Lomitas. It is a spectacular, almost unreal landscape of champales, marshes and trees covered by a ghostly vegetation, populated by caimans, capybaras and an extremely rich birdlife. In 2019 it was chosen as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of Argentina.
To the east, Río Pilcomayo National Park, on the border with Paraguay, protects marshes, lagoons and palm groves inhabited by water birds, maned wolves and caimans. The Laguna Oca Biosphere Reserve, next to the capital, rounds out a set of wetlands and woodlands that make Formosa an emerging destination for ecotourism and birdwatching, in one of the most authentic and least explored provinces in the country.
Jujuy is one of the oldest cradles of human occupation in Argentina: for more than ten thousand years the Quebrada de Humahuaca was a natural corridor linking the Andes with the lowlands, traveled by caravans and peoples. It was inhabited by the Omaguaca, Tilcara, Atacama and other peoples of the puna and the quebrada, high-altitude farmers who domesticated potatoes and quinoa, raised llamas and built pucarás —stone fortresses on the heights—, such as the imposing Pucará de Tilcara.
In the 15th century the region was incorporated into the Tahuantinsuyo, the Inca empire, which brought it into its road network —the Qhapaq Ñan or Inca Trail— and into its farming organization of terraces and storehouses. That deep Andean root sets Jujuy apart from the rest of the country and survives in its language, its music, its religious life and its festivals, closer kin to Bolivia and the Andean world than to the pampa.
The city of San Salvador de Jujuy was founded in 1593 by Francisco de Argañarás y Murguía, after two earlier failed attempts that had been destroyed by Indigenous resistance. It was born as a frontier bastion of the Spanish Empire facing the peoples of the Chaco and, above all, as an obligatory stop on the route that linked the Río de la Plata with Upper Peru and the silver mines of Potosí. Through the Quebrada de Humahuaca moved the mules, the silver and the goods that sustained the colonial economy.
That threshold position between the Andean north and the rest of the viceroyalty gave Jujuy a strategic importance out of all proportion to its size, and tied it closely to the ups and downs of the Potosí trade. It also made it, as soon as the revolution broke out, the front line against the royalist armies coming down from Upper Peru.
Because of its border position, Jujuy was a key stage of the wars of independence. Its most celebrated feat is the Jujuy Exodus of 1812: faced with the advance of the royalist army, general Manuel Belgrano ordered the whole population to abandon the city and the countryside, burning harvests, crops and anything that might serve the enemy, in a gigantic scorched-earth operation. Thousands of people marched some 250 kilometers toward Tucumán, leaving behind their houses and their possessions.
That collective sacrifice, together with Belgrano's victories at Tucumán (1812) and Salta (1813), saved the revolution in the north. For years Jujuy remained a land of frontier and of war: the gauchos of the quebrada and the puna, under local caudillos, waged a guerrilla war against the royalist invasions that went on for more than a decade. Jujuy honors the Exodus every August 23 as one of the great acts of patriotism in its history.
In the warm lowlands of eastern Jujuy, the yungas and the ramal, the economy of the 20th century revolved around the great sugar mills. Companies such as Ledesma —today one of the largest agro-industrial complexes in the country— and La Esperanza set up enormous cane plantations and refineries that transformed the landscape and the society. Every year, for the harvest, those mills recruited thousands of Indigenous workers from the puna, the quebrada and the Chaco, under very harsh conditions.
Sugar, along with mining, tobacco and later lithium, defined the modern economic profile of Jujuy and its social structure. It also marked its political history: episodes such as 'the Night of the Blackout' of 1976, during the last dictatorship, in the Ledesma area, were engraved in the memory of the province. On the puna today, lithium extraction in salt flats such as Olaroz reopens debates about development, water and the Andean communities.
The Quebrada de Humahuaca was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2003, as a cultural landscape bearing witness to more than ten millennia of history. Its towns —Purmamarca, at the foot of the Cerro de los Siete Colores; Tilcara, with its pucará; Humahuaca, with its monument to Independence— and its high-altitude landscapes, together with the dazzling Salinas Grandes and the multicolored hills of the Hornocal, are today one of the great tourist destinations in the country.
The culture of Jujuy is deeply Andean and very much alive: the Carnival of the Quebrada, with its comparsas, its coplas sung with the caja and the ritual of unearthing and burying the devil; the cult of the Pachamama, honored every August with offerings to the earth; the music of sikus, quenas and erkes; and a cooking of Andean potatoes, quinoa, maize and llama. In the yungas of the east, the mountain rainforest holds Calilegua National Park, the largest protected area in the province, while the Termas de Reyes offer warm waters among the mountains. In a small territory, Jujuy thus condenses the most Andean and ancestral Argentina.
The territory of La Pampa was for centuries the domain of the Ranquel and of other Pampa and Mapuche peoples, formidable horsemen who controlled the plain south of the Creole frontier. From their encampments, in places such as Leuvucó, they organized malones to seize cattle, but they also kept up a complex trade and intense dealings with the provinces to the north, exchanging hides, feathers, salt and animals. That world was described with sympathy and in detail by the soldier and writer Lucio V. Mansilla in his celebrated book 'Una excursión a los indios ranqueles' (1870), after living among them.
The great Ranquel chief of the period was Mariano Rosas —nephew of Panghitruz Güor—, who had spent his youth as a captive on the estancia of Juan Manuel de Rosas, from whom he took his surname. Under his leadership the Ranquel resisted the advance of the frontier for decades, in a delicate balance of war, treaties and trade with the Creole state.
La Pampa was one of the last regions incorporated by force into the Argentine state. The so-called Conquest of the Desert, the military campaign led by general Julio Argentino Roca between 1878 and 1885, subjugated the Indigenous peoples of the plain and Patagonia —Pampas, Ranqueles, Mapuches and Tehuelches— and opened their lands to colonization. The main offensive on Pampean territory began in 1879 and advanced with fire and sword over the encampments and the tolderías.
Indigenous resistance was broken: many Ranqueles died or were taken prisoner, their lands were parceled out among ranchers and military men, and the surviving communities were scattered or subjugated. Sierra sites such as Lihué Calel were the scene of those last battles, when leaders such as Namuncurá tried without success to reorganize the resistance. The campaign sealed the end of the free Indigenous world of the pampa and the beginning of the Creole occupation of the territory.
After the military conquest, in 1884 the area was organized as the National Territory of La Pampa, under Law 1532, governed directly from Buenos Aires and with no political autonomy for its inhabitants. Creole settlers and immigrants then arrived —Italians, Spaniards, French, Volga Germans— who founded towns, laid railway lines and turned the wetter eastern steppe into land for growing wheat and raising cattle.
The capital, Santa Rosa, was founded on April 22, 1892, as Santa Rosa del Toay by Tomás Mason, and in 1900 it became the head town of the territory. For decades its inhabitants demanded without success the right to elect their own authorities, that autonomy which the historic provinces did have and which was denied to the national territories.
The long demand for autonomy was fulfilled in the middle of the 20th century. Under Law 14,037, passed on July 20, 1951, and promulgated on August 8 of that year during the first government of Juan Domingo Perón, the national territories of La Pampa and Chaco were turned into provinces. The new Pampean province took for a time the name Provincia Eva Perón, in homage to Evita, and lost it after the 1955 coup to adopt the present one of La Pampa.
It is therefore one of the youngest provinces of the Republic, born as such in 1951. In 1960 it passed its provincial Constitution and consolidated its institutions. That institutional youth coexists with a strong identity tied to the countryside, to the epic of the settlers and to the memory —increasingly reclaimed— of the Ranquel peoples who lived there first.
La Pampa is a province of transition between two great Argentine regions: its east belongs to the fertile humid pampa, farming and cattle country; its west is an arid steppe of salt flats, travesías and scrub, already almost Patagonian. Its emblematic tree is the caldén, which forms the caldenal, one of the few native forests that grow on the Argentine plain and which gives the Pampean landscape its characteristic look.
Its main protected area is Lihué Calel National Park —'sierra of life' in the Mapuche language—, a low sierra massif that rises unexpectedly out of the plain and preserves rock paintings, steppe flora and fauna and sites tied to the Ranquel resistance. With a low population density, enormous open spaces and very clear skies, La Pampa keeps an identity bound to the countryside, hunting, fishing and Creole traditions, and offers the traveler a deep, silent Argentina of endless horizons.
Long before the Spanish arrived, the valleys and plains of La Rioja were inhabited by peoples of Diaguita stock —along with Capayanes and Olongastas—, farmers who mastered irrigated cultivation, pottery and metalwork. It is estimated that around the time of the conquest some twenty thousand Indigenous people lived in the jurisdiction. On this ground flourished remarkable archaeological cultures such as Condorhuasi (around 200 BC), Ciénaga, Aguada and Sanagasta, whose funerary urns and painted ceramics rank among the finest in the country.
By the fifteenth century the region had come under the influence of the Inca Tahuantinsuyo through the Collasuyo, which brought these valleys into its network of roads and its terraced farming system. That deep Andean root survives in the place names, in the traditions of the puna and in festivals with a strongly syncretic content.
The city of Todos los Santos de la Nueva Rioja was founded on May 20, 1591 by the governor of Tucumán, Juan Ramírez de Velasco, in the Sanagasta valley, in order to secure a strategic outpost facing the Indigenous peoples and to connect Tucumán with Cuyo and Chile. Colonial life revolved around farming in the valleys, cattle raising in the Llanos and an intense popular religiosity.
A deeply rooted legend tells that San Francisco Solano, a Franciscan missionary, pacified the Indigenous people with the music of his violin. From those years came the Tinkunaco, a ritual staged every December 31 that enacts the meeting —'tinkunaco' means 'meeting' in Quechua— between the Indigenous world, represented by the Allsallis, and the Hispanic-Christian world, around the image of the Niño Alcalde. The ceremony was declared Cultural Heritage of the Nation and still draws thousands of Riojanos.
The conquest was not peaceful. The Diaguitas of La Rioja led some of the harshest uprisings in the northwest. After a first revolt around 1595, in 1630 the Great Diaguita Uprising broke out and set the whole region ablaze; it was put down only after years of war, around 1636, by governor Felipe de Albornoz.
This conflict was part of the wider cycle of the Calchaquí Wars, which did not end until 1667, with the final defeat of the rebel peoples and the forced uprooting of entire communities, moved far from their valleys to break their resistance. The violence of those campaigns marked the human map of the province forever.
Few provinces embody Argentine federalism as fully as La Rioja. After the May Revolution, the cabildo of La Rioja joined the emancipation process and in January 1820, with central power dissolved, the province declared its autonomy; on March 1, 1820, Francisco Ortiz de Ocampo took office as its first autonomous governor. From this soil came Juan Facundo Quiroga, 'the Tiger of the Llanos', the most feared caudillo of the civil wars, governor from 1823 and immortalized —and demonized— by Domingo F. Sarmiento in his book 'Facundo'. Quiroga was killed in an ambush at Barranca Yaco on February 16, 1835.
Decades later, Ángel Vicente Peñaloza, 'el Chacho', commander of the Llanos, led the last great montonera resistance of the interior against the power of Buenos Aires after the battle of Pavón. He was killed in 1863 at Olta by major Pablo Irrazábal, who displayed his head stuck on a pike. As late as 1866, the caudillo Felipe Varela raised an army of thousands of men in the Famatina under the banner of the 'Revolution of the Colorados', defeated at Pozo de Vargas. That tradition of caudillos, poverty and rebellion forged much of La Rioja's political and cultural identity.
For centuries the economy of La Rioja was marked by the mining dream of the Famatina, a mountain of almost 6,000 meters in whose depths silver and gold were sought from colonial times onward. Between 1904 and 1929 the celebrated Chilecito-La Mejicana cable railway operated, an engineering feat that climbed more than 3,500 meters of vertical rise to bring the ore down from the heights; its stations and cables hang today as a testimony to that dream of metal.
More lasting was the farming of the valleys: the vine, which made Chilecito and the Famatina valley a high-altitude wine region —with the Fiesta Nacional del Vino Torrontés as its emblem—, and the olive, which turned Aimogasta and Arauco into a land of olives and oil. In the Llanos, goat and cattle raising sustained the families of the deep interior for generations. In recent decades, modern mining revived old tensions: repeated attempts to work the Famatina as an open-pit mine met with strong popular resistance.
The twentieth century in La Rioja had luminous and tragic moments alike. In 1972 the Provincial University of La Rioja was created, and the province sought to modernize its economy through industrial promotion schemes. Collective memory painfully preserves the killing of bishop Enrique Angelelli, a defender of the poor, in a traffic accident staged in August 1976, during the last military dictatorship; the Church later recognized him as a martyr and he was beatified in 2019.
The most influential political figure the province produced was Carlos Saúl Menem, the son of Syrian immigrants, governor of La Rioja in 1973 and again from 1983, and President of the Nation between 1989 and 1999. His decade in the Casa Rosada —with convertibility, the privatizations and a deep transformation of the State— left a lasting mark on the Argentina of the end of the century and put La Rioja at the center of the national stage.
La Rioja's greatest natural treasure is Talampaya National Park, an imposing canyon of reddish walls up to 150 meters high, sculpted by water and wind. Together with neighboring Ischigualasto, in San Juan, it forms a site declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2000 for its exceptional paleontological richness: some of the oldest dinosaurs and reptiles in the world were found in its Triassic strata. Towards the cordillera, the Laguna Brava Provincial Reserve protects high-altitude lagoons that are home to flamingos and vicuñas, among volcanoes rising above 6,000 meters.
The province's greatest festival is the Chaya, a carnival of Diaguita origin in which people play with flour, water and basil to the rhythm of vidalas, cajas and the singing of the chaya, an expression of Riojan joy and nostalgia. Among the red canyons, the centuries-old olive groves and the echo of its caudillos, La Rioja distills like few other places the untamed soul of the Argentine interior.
The valley where Mendoza stands today was known to the Huarpes as Huentota. This peaceful farming people devised a system of acequias, irrigation channels that used meltwater from the cordillera to water crops in an arid setting, turning the desert into an oasis. That hydraulic ingenuity —inherited in part from Inca influence— still shapes the city, with its network of tree-lined channels running along the edge of the sidewalks.
By the fifteenth century the region formed the southern frontier of the Tahuantinsuyo, which left its mark on roads and high-altitude shrines. The Huarpes paid tribute to the Incas and, after the Spanish arrived, many were subjected to the encomienda system and moved to Chile, which decimated the original people.
The city of Mendoza was founded on March 2, 1561 by captain Pedro del Castillo, under the name Mendoza del Nuevo Valle de La Rioja, in honor of the governor of Chile, García Hurtado de Mendoza. The following year Juan Jufré moved it and founded it again. Throughout the colonial period Mendoza did not depend on Buenos Aires but on the Captaincy General of Chile, with which it communicated by crossing the cordillera; only in 1776 did it become part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.
The vine arrived early: introduced around 1561-1566 by the missionaries, it found ideal conditions in the dry, sunny climate and in the irrigation of the acequias. By 1600 wine production already exceeded local consumption and was beginning to be traded, laying the foundations of a calling that would define the province for centuries.
Mendoza holds a place of honor in the epic of South American independence. Between 1814 and 1817, as governor intendant of Cuyo, José de San Martín organized the Army of the Andes there, mobilizing the entire population of Cuyo in an unprecedented collective effort: cannons were cast, uniforms were sewn, women donated their jewelry and provisions were stockpiled for the crossing.
In January 1817 that army crossed the cordillera through the Mendoza passes of Los Patos and Uspallata in a logistical and military feat comparable to the great campaigns of history, to liberate Chile at the battle of Chacabuco and then head by sea to Peru. That is why Mendoza considers itself the 'cradle of the Liberating Army' and venerates San Martín as its great hero; the Cerro de la Gloria, in Parque General San Martín, crowns that memory with an imposing monument.
On March 20, 1861, at 8:36 p.m., a violent earthquake of a magnitude close to 7.2 completely destroyed the old colonial city of Mendoza. It was one of the greatest catastrophes in Argentine history: it is estimated that more than a third of the population died, and the churches, the cabildo and the grand houses collapsed in seconds, followed by fires that swept away whatever was left standing.
The city was rebuilt somewhat further west, with a modern layout of wide streets, large earthquake-proof squares —such as Plaza Independencia— and a system of tree-lined acequias designed to provide shade, soften the arid climate and offer refuge in the event of new tremors. That Mendoza of plane trees, water running along the sidewalks and low buildings is the one known today.
The arrival of the railway in Mendoza in 1885 changed the scale of the province: for the first time Mendoza wine could reach the markets of Buenos Aires and the Litoral in a matter of days. Fueled by that connection and by European immigration —above all Italians and Spaniards, many of them winegrowers—, winemaking became industrialized and Mendoza turned into the country's great wine-producing center.
Wineries, vineyards and families with Italian and Spanish surnames filled Maipú, Luján de Cuyo and the irrigated oases. The Fiesta Nacional de la Vendimia, the national grape harvest festival, was born of that culture: institutionalized in 1936 by governor Guillermo Cano and his minister Frank Romero Day, it was held for the first time on April 18 of that year and today, every March, with its Vía Blanca, its carousel and its central ceremony at the Frank Romero Day Greek Theater, it is one of the largest popular celebrations in Argentina.
Mendoza produces close to 70% of Argentine wine and is the cradle of Malbec, the grape that became the country's emblem. Brought from France in the nineteenth century, the variety found in Mendoza's altitude, wide temperature swings and sunshine a unique expression that launched it onto the world market. Its wine regions —Maipú, Luján de Cuyo and, above all, the Uco Valley, more than 1,000 meters above sea level— belong to the international network of Great Wine Capitals and attract wine tourists from all over the planet.
That prestige turned wine tourism into an economic engine: wine roads, boutique wineries, luxury hotels and world-class cuisine now go hand in hand with traditional production. Wine is more than an industry: it is the backbone of Mendoza's identity.
Mendoza is also the kingdom of Argentina's high mountains. Here rises Aconcagua, at 6,961 meters the highest summit in the Americas and in the entire western hemisphere, a mecca of world mountaineering, protected by a provincial park. Around it unfolds a landscape of extraordinary diversity: Puente del Inca and its hot-spring formation, the historic village of Uspallata, the Las Leñas ski resort, the imposing Atuel canyon near San Rafael and the volcanic reserve of La Payunia, in the south of the Malargüe area, a sea of cones and lava flows.
Between vineyards, snowy peaks, mountain rivers and crystal-clear skies, Mendoza established itself as one of the great tourist destinations of Argentina and of South America, able to offer on a single trip a glass of Malbec at sunset and the sight of the roof of the Americas.
The territory of Misiones, covered by the lush Paraná rainforest or Atlantic Forest, was for thousands of years the home of the Guaraní people: hunters, fishers and slash-and-burn farmers who opened small clearings in the forest to sow cassava, maize and sweet potato. The Guaraní developed a rich cosmovision, a language that still echoes throughout the province and a way of life deeply tied to the forest, the rivers and their waterfalls.
That Indigenous presence is not only the past: Misiones is still home to numerous Mbyá Guaraní communities that keep their language, their spirituality and their knowledge of the biodiversity of the forest. The very name of the province and much of its place naming are rooted in that Guaraní world which the Jesuits, and later the European settlers, found on arriving.
The name Misiones comes from the reductions that the Society of Jesus founded from the beginning of the seventeenth century among the Guaraní of the rainforest. In towns such as San Ignacio Miní, Nuestra Señora de Loreto, Santa Ana and Santa María la Mayor, Jesuits and Guaraní built an experience unlike any other in the Americas: autonomous and prosperous communities, with temples of red stone, a printing press, workshops, orchestras, sculpture and baroque music, and a social organization of their own that resisted for decades the pressure of the encomenderos and of the slave-raiding bandeirantes.
The end of that world came in two blows: first the Treaty of Madrid of 1750, which forced the relocation of seven eastern towns and unleashed the Guaraní War; and then the expulsion of the Jesuits from all Spanish dominions, ordered by Charles III in 1767. Abandoned, the reductions were swallowed by the forest. Their monumental ruins —San Ignacio Miní among them— were declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1984 and still astonish visitors with their scale and their beauty.
After the War of the Triple Alliance and the settling of the borders with Paraguay and Brazil, on December 22, 1881 the National Territory of Misiones was created, governed directly from Buenos Aires. For more than seventy years its inhabitants lived without being able to elect their own authorities or to have representation in the national Congress: a curtailed citizenship, typical of the national territories.
The struggle for political autonomy dragged on for decades until, on December 22, 1953, during the second presidency of Juan Domingo Perón, Law 14,294 turned Misiones into a province. In 1958 the young province passed its first Constitution and elected its own authorities. Misiones is thus one of the youngest Argentine provinces in institutional terms, despite the thousand-year-old age of its settlement.
The modern economy of Misiones was built on the forest and on the red earth, that iron-rich soil. First came the extractive exploitation of wild yerba mate and of fine timber, with brutally hard working conditions for the laborers and mensúes, denounced in literature by authors such as Horacio Quiroga and Alfredo Varela. Then, from the 1920s onward, the systematic cultivation of yerba mate on plantations became the great engine of settlement in the province.
That yerba and timber boom drew waves of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to the 1895 census, close to a third of the population came from Brazil; later came Poles, Ukrainians, Germans from Brazil, Swedes, Swiss, Japanese and others, whom private companies such as Alto Paraná and Eldorado settled in planned colonies like Puerto Rico, Montecarlo and Eldorado. That multicultural mosaic gave Misiones its unique character and is celebrated every September at the Fiesta Nacional del Inmigrante in Oberá. Today the province produces most of Argentina's yerba mate, as well as tea, tobacco and timber.
The greatest treasure of Misiones is the Iguazú Falls, a system of some 275 cascades that pour down in the heart of the rainforest, shared with Brazil and protected by Iguazú National Park, declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1984. The Garganta del Diablo, with its curtain of water and its perpetual mist, is its most famous image. In 2011 the falls were chosen as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, and today they are the most visited tourist destination in Argentina.
Beyond the falls, Misiones guards the largest remnant of Paraná rainforest left in the country, home to the jaguar, the tapir, the caiman, toucans and an extraordinary biodiversity, protected in parks such as the Moconá Provincial Park, where the Uruguay River forms the peculiar lengthwise falls of the Moconá. The province also offers other attractions tied to its history and its red earth, such as the semi-precious stone mines of Wanda.
The north of Andean Patagonia was for centuries the home of the Pehuenches, so called for their bond with the pehuén or araucaria, whose fruit —the pine nut— was their staple food and an object of gathering and trade. They were peoples of hunters, gatherers and traders who commanded the mountain passes. From the eighteenth century onward they gradually merged into the Mapuche world that arrived from the other side of the Andes, in a process of araucanization that unified languages and customs on both sides of the cordillera.
The name Neuquén comes from Mapudungun and is said to refer to something 'daring', 'sweeping' or 'fast-flowing', in reference to the river. At the time of the state conquest, the territory was dominated by great loncos such as Purran in the north, Sayhueque —master of the 'Country of the Apples'— in the south, and Inacayal in the center, leaders of an Indigenous society that was still fully sovereign.
For almost all of its history the present-day territory of Neuquén remained outside the effective control of the state. There was an early Jesuit mission in 1653 and Juan Manuel de Rosas' desert campaign in 1833, but the definitive military occupation came with the Conquest of the Desert led by Julio A. Roca from 1879 onward.
Between 1879 and 1885, the columns of the Argentine Army advanced across northern Patagonia, subduing the Mapuche and Tehuelche communities by force of arms. Chief Sayhueque, one of the last to resist, did not surrender until 1885. The campaign brought vast territories into the national state at the cost of death, exile and the splitting up of entire families, a tragedy whose consequences still mark the Indigenous peoples of the region.
After the conquest, Neuquén was organized as a National Territory, governed directly from Buenos Aires. The capital city was born tied to the railway: on September 12, 1904, governor Carlos Bouquet Roldán moved the seat of government to the site of Confluencia, at the meeting of the Limay and Neuquén rivers, giving rise to the present-day city of Neuquén.
For decades the territorial economy rested on livestock raising on the steppe, logging in the cordillera and fruit growing in the Alto Valle. The aspiration to political autonomy was fulfilled only in 1955, when the territory was raised to the rank of province.
The great turning point in the modern history of Neuquén came with hydrocarbons. The discovery of oil at Plaza Huincul in the early twentieth century transformed the economy, and the province established itself as one of the country's main producers of oil and gas. In provincial politics the Movimiento Popular Neuquino prevailed, the party of the Sapag family, which governed Neuquén for much of the democratic period and gave it a distinctly autonomist profile.
In the twenty-first century, the Vaca Muerta formation —one of the largest shale reserves (shale oil and gas) in the world, in the Neuquén Basin— once again placed the province at the center of the country. Its development through hydraulic fracturing turned Neuquén into a key piece of Argentina's energy matrix and into the focus of heated economic and environmental debate.
Neuquén is one of the world capitals of paleontology. In the ravines and badlands of its territory some of the largest dinosaurs that ever existed have been found: Argentinosaurus and Patagotitan, giant sauropods that rank among the most colossal land animals known, and enormous predators such as Giganotosaurus, which rivals Tyrannosaurus. The area of Villa El Chocón, Plaza Huincul and Añelo holds a fossil heritage of global importance, displayed in museums such as the Ernesto Bachmann and the Carmen Funes.
The finds continue to this day: in 2025 a new species was officially presented in the province, Astigmasaura, which lived in the region some 95 million years ago. This richness has made Neuquén a paleontological tourism destination unlike any other in the world.
Towards the cordillera, Neuquén unfolds one of the most beautiful landscapes in Argentina. Lanín National Park, dominated by the perfect cone of the volcano of the same name and by the last great araucaria forests, protects crystal-clear lakes such as Huechulafquen and Lácar. From San Martín de los Andes runs the famous Route of the Seven Lakes, which winds between forests and mirrors of water as far as Villa La Angostura.
Further north, Villa Pehuenia nestles among thousand-year-old araucarias, and Caviahue-Copahue combines an active volcano with hot springs of international renown. Rivers ideal for fly fishing, ski resorts such as Chapelco and an almost untouched natural setting make western Neuquén a first-rate destination for adventure and contemplation, the perfect complement to the Patagonia of dinosaurs and oil.
Río Negro takes its name from the river that crosses it from west to east, one of the largest by volume in Patagonia and, for thousands of years, the great natural route between the Andes and the Atlantic. Its banks and its steppe were the domain of the Tehuelche (Aónikenk and Günün-a-künna), nomadic hunters of guanaco and rhea, and from the eighteenth century of Mapuche peoples who, after the introduction of the horse, controlled trade, the mountain passes and the routes of the great cattle drives.
This Indigenous society kept its independence in the face of the colony and of Argentina's first decades, with chiefs who negotiated as equals with the state and with Chile. The river was the axis of that world, the setting of treaties, raids and great trading rides.
The first and most enduring Spanish settlement in Patagonia was the Fuerte del Carmen, founded on April 22, 1779 by Francisco de Viedma y Narváez, as part of the crown's policy of asserting its presence along the Patagonian coast. After a flood destroyed the first buildings, the settlement moved to the north bank of the river, where the earliest colonists —many of them maragatos who had come from León, in Spain— had to dig their homes like caves into the ravines.
From that nucleus were born the twin cities of Carmen de Patagones (today in Buenos Aires Province) and Viedma (the present capital of Río Negro). In 1827, during the war with Brazil, the people of Patagones repelled an attempted imperial invasion in an episode remembered with pride, the defense of Patagones.
In 1879, the main column of the Conquest of the Desert advanced along the course of the Río Negro as far as Choele Choel, militarily subjugating the Indigenous communities and opening the region to occupation by the state. It was the decisive blow that put an end to Indigenous sovereignty along the entire line of the river. Many Indigenous people were displaced, handed out as labor or confined, and their lands given over to ranchers and colonizing companies.
In 1884, the area was organized as the National Territory of Río Negro, governed from Buenos Aires. For seven decades its inhabitants demanded political autonomy without success, until in 1955, under law 14,408 enacted during the government of Juan Domingo Perón, Río Negro was finally raised to the rank of province.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the combination of the railway and large irrigation works turned the Alto Valle of the Río Negro into one of the largest fruit-growing oases in the southern hemisphere. An integrated system of canals drawing on the waters of the Negro, the Limay and the Neuquén made it possible to irrigate tens of thousands of hectares and to turn the steppe into a garden of smallholdings.
From those farms come today the pears and apples of Río Negro —on the order of more than a million tonnes a year between the two fruits—, processed in hundreds of packing sheds and cold stores and exported all over the world. Cities such as General Roca, Cipolletti and Villa Regina grew to the rhythm of that fruit industry, which shaped the identity and the landscape of the valley.
Río Negro's great icon is San Carlos de Bariloche, on the shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi and at the foot of the Andes. The city grew at the hands of pioneers and immigrants from Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Chile, who gave it an alpine architecture of stone and wood. Its history as a tourist destination is tied to one fundamental figure: in 1903, the surveyor Francisco P. Moreno donated to the state three leagues of land in the area of Puerto Blest, on the condition that they be preserved for future generations.
Out of that donation came, in 1922, the Parque Nacional del Sud, the first in Argentina and in Latin America, reorganized in 1934 as Nahuel Huapi National Park. Forests, lakes, Cerro Catedral with its ski center, chocolate and outdoor life turned Bariloche into the capital of Patagonian tourism.
Few provinces pack in as much diversity as Río Negro, which stretches from the Andes to the Atlantic Ocean. To the west, the Andean district of El Bolsón and Villa Mascardi offers forests, rivers and a strong imprint of craft and back-to-nature living. In the center, the plateau and the steppe sustain sheep ranching and mining. To the east, on the shore of the Golfo San Matías, Las Grutas and the port of San Antonio Oeste combine beaches of temperate water, fishing and marine wildlife watching.
That transition of landscapes —ice, forest, fruit valley, plateau and sea— makes Río Negro a summary of the whole of Patagonia, able to offer mountain skiing and Atlantic beaches within a single territory.
The territory of Salta was one of the great centers of the Andean cultures of northwestern Argentina. It was inhabited by the Diaguita and by the peoples of the Calchaquí Valleys, advanced farmers of terraces and irrigation, potters and metalworkers, who by the fifteenth century had been absorbed into the Collasuyo, the southern sector of the Inca empire. An impressive testimony to that high-altitude culture are the summit sanctuaries, such as the one on the Llullaillaco volcano, which yielded the famous Children of Llullaillaco, mummies from Inca ritual offerings preserved by the cold and kept today in Salta.
The Calchaquí led one of the longest resistances on the continent. The Calchaquí Wars stretched over more than a century, with uprisings such as the one led by Juan Calchaquí, and ended only in the mid-seventeenth century with the subjugation and forced uprooting of entire peoples, deported far from their valleys.
Following orders from the viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, Hernando de Lerma founded on April 16, 1582 the city of San Felipe de Lerma in the valley of Salta, as a bastion on the royal road linking the Río de la Plata with Upper Peru and Potosí. The city —soon renamed Salta by its own residents— took advantage of its strategic position to become a prosperous colonial center and a great mule market, where mules were bred and traded by the thousand for the mines of the north.
From that period Salta preserves a remarkable architectural heritage: its Cabildo, its colonial churches and its historic quarter make it one of the most beautiful cities in the country, nicknamed 'Salta la Linda'. Its position on the frontier, moreover, would place it at the center of the wars of independence.
As the gateway to Upper Peru, Salta was a decisive setting in the wars of independence. On February 20, 1813, General Manuel Belgrano won there a crucial victory over the royalist army of Pío Tristán at the battle of Salta, which allowed him to free the whole northwest and consolidate the revolution in the north.
Over the following years, however, the royalist troops of Upper Peru launched repeated invasions of the province. In that context of permanent war, a decree of supreme director Gervasio Posadas dated October 8, 1814 created the Province of Salta, separating it from the old Intendancy of Salta del Tucumán, and its defense was placed in the hands of a caudillo destined for legend: Martín Miguel de Güemes.
Salta's great hero is Martín Miguel de Güemes, governor of the province, who between 1815 and 1821 defended the northern frontier of the United Provinces against six royalist invasions from Upper Peru. With his army of gauchos —horsemen of the people who fought on their own ground with guerrilla tactics, harassment and knowledge of the terrain— he waged the so-called 'gaucho war', wearing down the enemy and protecting the rear of San Martín's crossing of the Andes, which could thus concentrate on liberating Chile and Peru.
Güemes died in June 1821 from wounds received in a royalist ambush on the outskirts of the city, becoming the only Argentine general to fall in action during the wars of independence. He and his gauchos are the greatest symbol of Salta's identity, honored every June 17 with mass horseback processions and vigils beneath his monument.
In the southwest of the province, the Calchaquí Valleys are the heart of rural, wine-growing Salta. Cafayate, their capital, produces some of the highest-altitude wines in the world —the vineyards lie above 1,700 meters and some reach more than 3,000—, with Torrontés as its flagship grape, an aromatic white wine that became the country's wine-making banner. Adobe villages such as Cachi, Molinos and Angastaco preserve an architecture and a way of life tied to the land.
The landscape of these valleys is extraordinarily beautiful: the Quebrada de las Conchas, with reddish formations such as the Garganta del Diablo and the Anfiteatro; the Cuesta del Obispo, which climbs toward the Recta del Tin Tin; and the immense cardón cactus forests of Los Cardones National Park. That combination of wine, culture and geography made the Calchaquíes one of the most celebrated tourist circuits in Argentina.
One of the great icons of Salta is the Tren a las Nubes, the 'Train to the Clouds', which runs along branch line C-14 of the Belgrano Railway, climbing the Quebrada del Toro toward the puna. It was an enormous feat of engineering: designed by the American engineer Richard Maury, it was built between 1921 and 1948 —with long interruptions, such as the one that followed the 1930 coup— without a rack rail, overcoming the change in altitude by means of loops and zigzags. Its high point is the La Polvorilla Viaduct, finished in 1932, a steel structure 224 meters long and 63 high, at 4,220 meters above sea level.
The puna of Salta unfolds landscapes from another planet: the Salinas Grandes, the multicolored hills on the road to San Antonio de los Cobres and the volcanoes of the high cordillera. With its colonial and folk culture —the zamba, the chacarera, the peñas and the copla— and its cuisine of empanadas, humita, tamales and locro, Salta condenses much of the soul of the Argentine north.
The valley of San Juan was inhabited by the Huarpe, a farming people who —as in neighboring Mendoza— built an ingenious system of irrigation ditches to carry meltwater to their fields in an arid setting, along with other groups such as the Diaguita, the Capayán and the Olongasta. By the fifteenth century the region formed part of the southern frontier of the Inca Tahuantinsuyo, whose influence can be seen in high-altitude farming and in the roads.
The city of San Juan de la Frontera was founded in 1562 by Juan Jufré and moved two kilometers south in 1593 because of the frequent flooding of the San Juan River. Throughout the colonial period it depended on the Captaincy General of Chile, within the region of Cuyo along with Mendoza and San Luis, and its economy revolved early on around wine growing, brandy and dried fruit, sustained by the irrigation inherited from the Huarpe.
San Juan is the birthplace of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888), one of the most influential and most contested figures in Argentine history: writer, journalist, educator, soldier, governor of the province and president of the nation between 1868 and 1874. Author of the celebrated 'Facundo. Civilización y barbarie', a passionate champion of public education, of immigration and of material progress, Sarmiento founded schools, brought teachers from the United States and left a deep mark on the country's cultural course in the nineteenth century.
The house where he was born, in the center of the city of San Juan, is today a National Historic Monument and a museum. Sarmiento's imprint —faith in the school and the book as tools of transformation— is still a trait of San Juan's civic identity, which also produced other national figures in politics and culture.
San Juan, like the rest of Cuyo, contributed men and resources to San Martín's Army of the Andes and took an active part in the life of the United Provinces after declaring its autonomy in 1820. San Juan's nineteenth century was marked by the struggle between Unitarians and Federalists and by episodes of political violence, such as the assassination in 1841 of the Unitarian governor Nazario Benavídez years later, in a climate of constant confrontation.
That turbulent stage forged a province of strong political character, which gave the country not only Sarmiento but numerous leaders who carried weight on the national stage, and which consolidated its place within the constitutional organization of the country from 1853 onward.
On January 15, 1944, a devastating earthquake destroyed the city of San Juan and left around 10,000 dead —close to 10% of its population—, in the greatest natural catastrophe in Argentine history. The tragedy had consequences that went far beyond the province: Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, then in charge of the Secretariat of Labor, led the national relief campaign for the victims, which catapulted him into public view. It was at a benefit festival organized for those affected that Perón met the actress Eva Duarte, the future Eva Perón.
The reconstruction of San Juan became the first great state building program in the country. The city was raised again along earthquake-resistant lines: wide streets, low buildings and a modern look that it keeps to this day.
San Juan is Argentina's second wine province after Mendoza, famous for its wines —especially Syrah, which found here a first-rate expression—, as well as for a substantial output of table grapes, raisins, olive oil and grape must. Its dry, luminous climate, with more than 300 days of sun a year, is celebrated in the Fiesta Nacional del Sol, the great provincial festival.
To that agricultural base was added, in recent decades, large-scale mining in the cordillera: gold and silver deposits such as Veladero, high in the mountains, turned San Juan into one of the most important mining provinces in the country, not without generating environmental debate over operations in glacier and periglacial areas.
In the northeast of the province lies Ischigualasto Provincial Park, known as the 'Valle de la Luna', the Valley of the Moon, a desert landscape of strange shapes sculpted by erosion —el Hongo, el Submarino, las Bochas— that look as if they belonged to another planet. Together with neighboring Talampaya, in La Rioja, it has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 2000 for its exceptional wealth of fossils: its Triassic strata hold some of the oldest dinosaurs and reptiles in the world, such as Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus.
The high cordillera rounds out what San Juan offers in the way of nature: at Barreal, the Pampa del Leoncito has skies so clear that astronomical observatories operate there and land sailing is practiced; the imposing Cerro Mercedario rises above 6,700 meters; and the San Guillermo Reserve protects herds of vicuña and guanaco on the puna. Sun, wine and lunar desert make San Juan a singular destination in western Argentina.
The territory of San Luis was inhabited by the Comechingones in the sierras —hunter-gatherers and farmers who lived in half-buried houses— and by Pampa peoples and, later, Ranqueles on the plains of the south. The latter, semi-nomadic horsemen given to hunting, herding and trade, began to settle in the south of San Luis and La Pampa toward the end of the sixteenth century and kept their independence from the criollo world well into the nineteenth.
The geographic position of San Luis, on the passage between the humid pampa and the cordillera, made it at once the 'Gateway to Cuyo' and a long frontier with the Indigenous communities of the south, studded with small forts and marked by continuous dealings —commercial and warlike— between criollos and Indigenous people.
The city of San Luis was founded on August 25, 1594 by Luis Jufré de Loaysa y Meneses, son of the founder of San Juan, under the name San Luis de Loyola Nueva Medina de Rioseco, as part of the Spanish expansion from Chile into Cuyo. More recent historical research indicates that that first act of foundation failed to consolidate a stable settlement, and that the city only took firm hold toward the end of the seventeenth century.
Throughout the colonial period, San Luis belonged to the region of Cuyo along with Mendoza and San Juan, under the Captaincy General of Chile, and led a modest life of farming, ranching and obligatory stop on the route between Buenos Aires and the cordillera.
San Luis contributed decisively to San Martín's campaign: its men and resources joined the Army of the Andes, and royalist prisoners captured after the crossing were held in the province. From its soil came one of the great military figures of the emancipation, Colonel Juan Pascual Pringles (1795-1831), famous for his daring in the liberating campaigns in Peru —where he starred in the heroic combat of Pozo de Vargas, or of Chancay— and at the battle of Ituzaingó during the war with Brazil.
San Luis declared its autonomy in 1820, when the local Cabildo set up the first autonomous provincial government under the figure of the Cabildo Gobernador. Over the nineteenth century it lived through the struggle between Unitarians and Federalists and produced caudillos such as Juan Saá, later consolidating its place as a province within the national organization.
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, San Luis was a poor province with a small population, marked by the emigration of its sons and daughters to other regions of the country in search of work. The economy rested on ranching, dryland farming and small-scale mining.
That reality changed from the 1980s onward, when industrial promotion schemes attracted factories and capital, and the Rodríguez Saá family —central to modern politics in San Luis— drove a strong program of public works, forestation, motorways, dams and digital connectivity. San Luis became one of the provinces with the best road infrastructure in the country, though not without debate about its political model.
The geography of San Luis combines the Sierras de San Luis and the Sierras de los Comechingones with broad plains toward the south. That upland relief, with rivers, reservoirs and a pleasant climate, made tourism one of its main activities. Merlo, at the foot of the Sierras de los Comechingones, is famous for its microclimate, considered one of the healthiest in the world; Potrero de los Funes, with its lake and its racing circuit set among the hills, and Carpintería round out the offering of rest and nature.
Toward the northwest, Sierra de las Quijadas National Park protects a spectacular landscape of reddish cliffs, canyons and natural amphitheaters such as the Potrero de la Aguada, along with important fossil beds where dinosaurs and pterosaurs have been found. Green sierras, clear skies and red deserts make San Luis an upland destination with a strong identity.
For thousands of years Santa Cruz was the great territory of the Tehuelche (Aónikenk), nomadic hunters of guanaco and rhea who crossed the southern Patagonian steppe on foot. Tall, skilled with the boleadora and expert readers of that immensity, they left one of the most impressive archaeological treasures in the Americas: the Cueva de las Manos, in the canyon of the Pinturas River, with rock paintings up to 9,000 years old —stencilled hand silhouettes, hunting scenes and geometric figures— declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1999.
The first Europeans sighted these coasts in the sixteenth century: Ferdinand Magellan's expedition put in at the bay of San Julián in 1520 and named the Santa Cruz River —which gave the province its name— around August of that year. Despite those early contacts, the region remained fully Indigenous land for more than three centuries.
The effective incorporation of Santa Cruz into the Argentine state came at the end of the nineteenth century, after the Conquest of the Desert and the settlement of the border with Chile. Under Law 1532 on the Organization of the National Territories, of October 16, 1884, the National Territory of Santa Cruz was created, governed from Buenos Aires.
Colonization arrived hand in hand with large livestock estancias devoted to raising sheep, with a strong presence of British and Chilean immigrants and others who built up estates of thousands of hectares. Wool became the great Patagonian wealth, exported to European markets, and forged a social landscape of ranch hands, shearers and big wool companies that defined the province for almost a century.
The wool boom had its tragic side. When the First World War ended, the collapse of the international price of wool hit the estancias and their workers hard. Between 1920 and 1921, the rural laborers, organized by anarchist-leaning unions, went on strike demanding better living and working conditions.
The movement, known as the Patagonia Rebelde or Patagonia Trágica, was put down by the Army under Lieutenant Colonel Héctor Benigno Varela, who had hundreds of strikers shot on the estancias of southern Santa Cruz. That massacre —immortalized by the writer Osvaldo Bayer in 'La Patagonia rebelde'— remains one of the darkest episodes in Argentine labor history.
Through the twentieth century, Santa Cruz diversified its economy beyond wool. In 1944 oil was discovered near Río Gallegos and in the Cañadón Seco area, and in the far southwest, close to the cordillera, coal mining was developed at Río Turbio, the country's only important coal basin, served by a railway of its own.
The territory was finally raised to the rank of province in 1957, after a long struggle for political autonomy. In recent decades, hydrocarbon activity, gold and silver mining and a rapidly expanding tourism sector have rounded out a productive base marked by vast open spaces and low population density.
In the democratic period, Santa Cruz projected onto national politics one of the most influential couples in recent Argentine history. Néstor Kirchner was mayor of Río Gallegos and governor of the province before reaching the presidency of the Nation in 2003, after the deep crisis of 2001. His wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a senator for Santa Cruz, succeeded him as president between 2007 and 2015 and returned to the front line as vice-president.
For almost two decades, this southern province —one of the least populated in the country— thus carried a disproportionate weight on the Argentine political stage, in a phenomenon that deeply marked national public life in the twenty-first century.
Santa Cruz's greatest treasure is Los Glaciares National Park, a World Heritage Site since 1981, which holds part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the largest ice cap outside the polar regions. Its star is the Perito Moreno glacier, one of the few in the world in equilibrium, famous for its spectacular ruptures and ice calvings, reached from the town of El Calafate, on Lago Argentino.
Toward the north of the park, El Chaltén —the 'national capital of trekking'— lies at the foot of Cerro Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre, granite spires that are meccas of world mountaineering. The endless steppe, the glaciers, the Andean forest and an Atlantic coast of historic ports such as Puerto Deseado and Puerto San Julián —where Magellan spent the winter of 1520— make Santa Cruz one of the planet's great nature destinations.
The Santa Fe region was inhabited by Indigenous peoples such as the Timbú, Calchines, Mocoretá and Quiloaza along the rivers, who lived from fishing, hunting and incipient agriculture, and by Chaco groups —Mocoví and Abipón— to the north. On those lands, on November 15, 1573, Juan de Garay founded the city of Santa Fe on the site known today as Cayastá (Santa Fe la Vieja), one of the first permanent settlements in what is now Argentine territory, conceived to 'open doors to the land' and connect Asunción with the Río de la Plata.
Constant floods, plagues of locusts and conflicts with the Indigenous peoples forced the city, around 1660, to move to its present location. The ruins of Santa Fe la Vieja at Cayastá, excavated by archaeologists, are today a valuable historic site that preserves the foundations of that first city and even the tomb of the conquistador Hernandarias.
Santa Fe was one of the great bastions of Argentine federalism. Its central figure was Estanislao López, governor between 1818 and 1838, nicknamed the 'Patriarch of the Federation'. In 1819, at his urging, the province issued its first Provisional Statute, considered the first constitution of an Argentine province. López defended provincial autonomy by force of arms against the centralism of Buenos Aires and signed fundamental agreements such as the Treaty of Pilar and the Federal Pact of 1831, key pieces of the country's institutional edifice.
That federal tradition, with its caudillos and its militias, coexisted with Santa Fe's calling to give the Nation a legal framework, and placed the province at the heart of the struggles and the agreements that preceded constitutional organization.
On the banks of the Paraná River, in what was then the village of Rosario, one of the founding events of the country's symbolism took place. On February 27, 1812, General Manuel Belgrano had the light blue and white flag raised for the first time before the Libertad and Independencia batteries, which he himself had installed to defend the river. The hoisting was carried out by the young Cosme Maciel, and the banner had been made by a group of ladies led by Catalina Echevarría de Vidal.
That gesture, made without authorization from the government in Buenos Aires, gave rise to the national symbol par excellence. Today the spot is marked by the imposing Monumento Nacional a la Bandera, the National Flag Memorial, Rosario's main icon and the site of the official ceremonies of Flag Day.
Santa Fe holds a unique place in the institutional organization of Argentina. It was in the city of Santa Fe that the General Constituent Congress, meeting after the fall of Rosas at Caseros, enacted on May 1, 1853 the National Constitution which, with successive reforms, remains in force to this day and established the republican, representative and federal system of the country.
The province's constitutional calling was reaffirmed over time: the city of Santa Fe also hosted the conventions that reformed the Magna Carta in 1860, 1866, 1957 and 1994, the last of these sharing its seat with Paraná. That is why Santa Fe is known as the 'cradle of the National Constitution'.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Santa Fe received intense European immigration that transformed its economy and its society. In 1856, the entrepreneur Aarón Castellanos founded Esperanza, considered the first organized farming colony in the country, settled above all by Swiss, Germans, Belgians and French. That experiment gave rise to a successful model of colonies that filled the center and south of the province with small farmers and made Santa Fe one of the great granaries of the Argentine pampas.
Wheat, corn, flax and, later, soy, together with a powerful agro-industry and a railway and port network, turned the province into an engine of the agro-export economy. Santa Fe's 'pampa gringa' —towns with Italian and European surnames, cooperatives and bell towers— is one of the most productive regions in the country.
Rosario, on the Paraná River, grew from a modest chapel into the most populous city in the province and one of the country's main ports and industrial and financial hubs. 'The Argentine Chicago', as it was called for its drive, is the birthplace of universal figures such as Che Guevara and the footballer Lionel Messi, and home to a vibrant cultural and educational scene.
The north of the province had a very different history: there the English company La Forestal exploited the red quebracho forests for decades to extract tannin, razing enormous stretches of woodland before pulling out in the middle of the twentieth century and leaving ghost towns behind. Between the splendor of Rosario, the wealth of the pampa gringa and the memory of the quebracho, Santa Fe condenses the lights and the shadows of Argentine development.
Before the conquest, the Santiago region was inhabited by peoples such as the Juríes and Tonocoté in the heart of the territory, and by the Lule and Vilela in other areas, farmers and hunters of the scrubland and of the Dulce and Salado rivers. A remarkable feature, unique in Argentina, is that Santiago Quichua survives there to this day: a variant of Quechua brought and spread in colonial times that endures as a living language, spoken by tens of thousands of people and present in music and in daily life, an exceptional case of the continuity of an Indigenous language outside the Andean zone.
That linguistic heritage, interwoven with old Spanish, is one of the deepest marks of Santiago identity and a cultural rarity on the map of the country.
Santiago del Estero del Nuevo Maestrazgo, founded on July 25, 1553 by Francisco de Aguirre, is the oldest surviving Spanish-founded city in what is now Argentine territory. That primacy earned it the title of 'Mother of Cities': from it set out the expeditions that founded Córdoba, San Miguel de Tucumán, Salta, La Rioja, Jujuy and other cities in the center and north of the country.
During the first colonial centuries, Santiago was the most important center in the northwest, seat of the governorship of Tucumán and of an early bishopric. Governors, bishops and chroniclers passed through its streets, and it was there that the friar and poet Luis de Tejeda wrote. That centrality, however, was not to last.
As time went on, Santiago del Estero lost prominence to cities it had itself helped to found, such as Córdoba, Tucumán and Salta, which surpassed it in population and wealth. The province was left behind economically and, after declaring its autonomy in 1820, went through the nineteenth century marked by poverty, civil wars and the rule of caudillos such as the Taboada family.
Its agrarian structure and the lack of investment kept it for a long time among the most neglected provinces in the country, with heavy emigration of its people toward other regions. Even so, Santiago preserved a deep criollo identity and an intense attachment to its traditions, which would become its great patrimony.
The modern economic history of Santiago del Estero was marked by the exploitation of the red quebracho, from which tannin for tanning hides and an extremely hard timber were obtained. From the end of the nineteenth century, logging camps and railways advanced on the Chaco forest of Santiago, and the powerful Anglo-German company La Forestal —owner of more than two million hectares spread across Santa Fe, Chaco, Salta and Santiago— razed enormous stretches of woodland.
When the company found cheaper sources of tannin and closed its operations in the middle of the twentieth century, it left behind devastated forests, eroded soils and towns with no work, in one of the greatest environmental and social disasters caused by a single company in Argentine history.
Santiago del Estero is, in its own right, one of the capitals of Argentine folk music and the cradle of the chacarera, the dance and music of foot-stamping and counterpoint that represents the province across the country. From its soil came legendary figures such as the musician and collector Andrés Chazarreta, considered the 'patriarch of folk music', the Hermanos Ábalos and, later, artists such as the Carabajal family and Peteco Carabajal.
The copla, the vidala, the chacarera sung in Quichua and life on the banks of the Dulce River define a culture with deep criollo roots. The popular festivals, the peñas and a living religiosity —with devotions such as that of the Señor de los Milagros of Mailín— round out a cultural heritage that makes Santiago an endearing place within the deep interior of the country.
The Dulce River and the great Río Hondo reservoir give life to Las Termas de Río Hondo, the largest thermal spa center in Argentina, a spa town sitting on fourteen aquifers of mineral-medicinal waters that emerge at more than 30 degrees. Its hotels and spas attract tourists all year round, and the local racetrack hosts international motorcycling and motor racing events.
Toward the northeast, Copo National Park protects one of the last large well-preserved remnants of Chaco forest, home to the jaguar, the giant armadillo and the red quebracho. Hot springs, river, scrubland and a criollo cuisine of empanadas, locro and roast kid complete the profile of a province that keeps, in its purest form, the soul of the Argentine north.
The great island of Tierra del Fuego was inhabited for thousands of years by remarkable Indigenous peoples: the Selk'nam (Ona), land hunters of the guanaco who crossed the north of the island on foot; the Yámana or Yagán, canoe people of the Beagle Channel who survived the southern cold by fishing and hunting sea lions; and the Haush and the Alacaluf (Kawésqar). The island's name comes from the fires Ferdinand Magellan saw burning along its coasts when he crossed, in 1520, the strait that now bears his name; he first called it 'Land of Smoke' and later 'Land of Fire'.
These peoples developed cultures deeply adapted to the far end of the continent, with ceremonies such as the Hain of the Selk'nam, and they remained practically without sustained contact with Europeans until well into the nineteenth century.
The encounter with the white man proved catastrophic for the Fuegian peoples. From the 1880s onward, the expansion of sheep ranching —tied to the British wool industry, which spread from the Malvinas to Patagonia and to the island— unleashed a genocide against the Selk'nam. Ranchers and hired agents went so far as to pay for every Indigenous person killed, while introduced diseases, forced removals to missions and deliberate hunting decimated the population.
It is estimated that by 1891, barely eight years after the first large estancia was set up, the Selk'nam population had been reduced to some 2,000 individuals, and that by the first decade of the twentieth century fewer than two hundred remained. Ángela Loij, one of the last Selk'nam speakers, died in 1974. The memory of that extermination —and the claims of the descendants who today assert their heritage— is an open debt in Argentine history.
The effective occupation of the island came through the missions —first Anglican, with the one established at Ushuaia in 1869, and later Salesian— and through official Argentine settlement. On October 12, 1884, the Navy Subdivision under Commodore Augusto Lasserre raised the national flag at Ushuaia, founding the southernmost city in the country.
To secure sovereignty at the end of the continent, the State created a prison there, whose first dangerous inmates arrived around 1902. The convicts —among them famous criminals and political prisoners— built much of the city, its buildings and the railway that hauled firewood and stone. The old penitentiary, closed in 1947, is today one of the main museums in Ushuaia, and that branch line, reopened for tourism, is the celebrated Tren del Fin del Mundo, the End of the World Train.
Tierra del Fuego was governed for almost the whole of the twentieth century as a National Territory, dependent on Buenos Aires. Its development accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s with an industrial promotion regime that drew electronics factories to Río Grande and Ushuaia and multiplied the population.
It was the last to attain the rank of province, in 1990, under the lengthy name of Province of Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica and South Atlantic Islands, a name that expresses the Argentine claim of sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands —whose war, in 1982, had the province as rearguard and logistics base— and over the Antarctic sector. That southern and Antarctic projection is an inseparable part of its political identity.
Ushuaia, on the Beagle Channel and at the foot of snow-covered peaks that drop almost into the sea, is the southernmost city in the world and the great tourist destination of the province. It is the base for cruises to Antarctica, the starting point of the End of the World Train and the gateway to Tierra del Fuego National Park, a setting of glaciers, peat bogs, beaver dams, lakes and forests of lenga and guindo that reaches as far as Lapataia Bay, where the mythical National Route 3 comes to an end.
Sailings along the Beagle to the Les Éclaireurs lighthouse, sightings of sea lions and penguins, and the view of the islands that come before Cape Horn round out a unique end-of-the-world experience. The city today combines extreme nature with a vibrant tourist life at the point where the American continent dissolves into the sea.
In the north of the island, the Fuegian steppe is a world apart from mountainous Ushuaia: wind-swept plains where the great sheep estancias stretch out and where Río Grande stands, capital of industry and of sport fishing for trout, with rivers famous the world over among fly fishers. In the center of the island, Tolhuin lies beside Lake Fagnano, the largest in Tierra del Fuego.
The provincial economy rests today on a particular mix: the electronics and home-appliance hub sheltered by industrial promotion, the extraction of oil and gas from the subsoil and from the offshore platform, sheep ranching on the steppe and a nature tourism in full swing. Between the fires of its ancient inhabitants and the ice of its glaciers, Tierra del Fuego closes the map of Argentina at the end of the world.
The valleys and the yungas of Tucumán were one of the great centers of the Diaguita cultures of the northwest, farmers of terraces and irrigation strongly influenced, by the fifteenth century, by the Inca empire. In the Calchaquí Valleys stands the Sacred City of Quilmes, the largest pre-Hispanic settlement in the country, an urban complex of stone at the foot of the hill that came to house thousands of inhabitants.
The Quilmes, a Calchaquí people, led one of the longest resistances against the Spanish, within the cycle of the Calchaquí Wars. They were defeated only around 1665-1667, after the uprising headed by the cacique Chelemín and by the false Inca Pedro Bohórquez, and their punishment was atrocious: the survivors were deported on foot more than 1,200 kilometers to the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where they were confined in the reducción that gave its name to the present-day city of Quilmes.
The city of San Miguel de Tucumán was founded on May 31, 1565 by Diego de Villarroel, at the site of Ibatín, some 60 kilometers south of its present location. Floods, plagues and the unhealthiness of the site forced the city to be moved to its definitive location in 1685, on the plain at the foot of the sierras.
Set on the piedmont, between the Chaco plain and the yungas forest, and on the route linking the Río de la Plata with Upper Peru and Potosí, Tucumán became a key commercial crossroads: along its roads passed the mules, the carts and the muleteers that supplied the mining north. Much of its early importance was born of that vocation as a crossroads.
Tucumán was a decisive stage of the wars of independence. On September 24, 1812, general Manuel Belgrano fought the battle of Tucumán on the outskirts of the city, defeating the royalist army commanded by Pío Tristán. The victory was doubly remarkable because Belgrano had disobeyed the order of the Buenos Aires government to fall back to the south: by giving battle and winning, he saved the northwest for the revolution and halted the royalist advance on the heart of the United Provinces.
Tradition attributes the triumph to the protection of the Virgen de la Merced, whom Belgrano named 'Generala' of the army, a devotion still alive in the province. That battle opened the way to the later victory at Salta and consolidated Tucumán as a fundamental patriot stronghold.
The event that gives Tucumán a unique place in Argentine history took place on July 9, 1816: in a house in San Miguel de Tucumán, the Congress of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata declared Independence from the king of Spain and from all foreign domination. Choosing Tucumán as the seat of the Congress —far from a Buenos Aires in crisis and in the center of the country— was in itself a federal and strategic gesture.
That Casa Histórica de la Independencia, with its famous hall of the oath, is today one of the most revered monuments in Argentina and a National Museum. Tucumán proudly holds the double status of military stage, with the battle of 1812, and political stage, with the declaration of 1816, of the nation's emancipation.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the economy of Tucumán revolved around sugarcane. The bishop and 1816 congressman José Eusebio Colombres promoted the sugar industry by setting up one of the first cane mills in 1821, and with the arrival of the railway and mechanization the sugar mills multiplied: by the middle of the twentieth century more than twenty were operating in the province. Sugar generated wealth, a powerful agro-industry and a working-class identity, but also dependence and recurring crises.
The most dramatic one came in 1966, when the government of general Onganía closed eleven mills at a stroke, causing mass unemployment, exodus and impoverishment. That blow turned Tucumán into a focus of social and political conflict that led, already in the 1970s, to the so-called Operativo Independencia (1975), the first great repressive operation of the State, which preceded the dictatorship. The lemon —of which Tucumán is today one of the world's largest producers— diversified that matrix over time.
Its exuberant yungas vegetation, its green hills and its subtropical climate earned Tucumán the nickname 'Garden of the Republic'. Despite being the smallest province in the country, it is one of the most densely populated and one of those with the greatest cultural and university weight in the north, with a National University of long tradition.
Its destinations condense that richness: Tafí del Valle, a sierra refuge among mountains and menhirs; Amaicha del Valle, with its Fiesta de la Pachamama; the ruins of Quilmes; the old sugar mills converted into museums; and a circuit of yungas and valleys of singular beauty. With the Casa Histórica, sugarcane, the zamba and an intense cultural life, the smallest province in Argentina is one of the richest in history and identity.