🇦🇷 Argentina · Buenos Aires
Mar del Tuyú and Costa del Este are two family beach towns in the Partido de la Costa, at the northern end of the Buenos Aires Atlantic coast, an area known as the Costa Atlántica or the Tuyú. Mar del Tuyú is in fact the seat (capital) of the Partido de la Costa, which strings together a run of adjoining beach towns — from San Clemente del Tuyú to Mar de Ajó — with a quiet, affordable profile that families love.
These towns are known for their wide fine-sand beaches, calm shallow water and a serene, family atmosphere, without the crowds or the heavy nightlife of other destinations. Costa del Este stands out as a leafy, tidy town, planned with plenty of greenery, while Mar del Tuyú combines its administrative role with a beach offering. Being relatively close to Buenos Aires and affordable makes them a popular summer choice.
This guide covers the essentials of Mar del Tuyú and Costa del Este with a practical eye: their beaches, the setting of the Partido de la Costa, the fishing and outdoor activities, the neighboring beach towns, where to eat and sleep, and how to get there. They are ideal destinations for a quiet, affordable family holiday on the Argentine coast.
Mar del Tuyú and Costa del Este are part of the Partido de la Costa, created in 1978 when it split from the old General Lavalle district, in the region known as the Tuyú. Mar del Tuyú is the district seat. These beach towns developed through the 20th century as family summer villages on the dunes and shoreline of the northern Buenos Aires coast. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The agro-export heart of Argentina: the endless pampa that was the land of the Querandí and the Pampa peoples, the domain of governor Rosas, the engine of cattle and wheat with La Plata as its purpose-built capital, cradle of the gaucho and of the Atlantic Coast where the whole country spends its summer.
Read the history of Buenos Aires Province →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
One fact catches more than one distracted holidaymaker off guard: Mar del Tuyú, a quiet beach town of shallow water where families set up their umbrella without hurrying, is nothing less than the administrative capital of an entire Buenos Aires district, even though it is not even the best-known beach town on that coast. That paradox — a discreet capital of a tourist strip that includes far more famous names such as Santa Teresita or San Bernardo — is explained by a history of bare dunes, cattle estancias and 20th-century land subdivisions that ended up drawing this whole stretch of the northern Buenos Aires shoreline.
The region known as the Tuyú covers the northern end of the Atlantic coast of Buenos Aires province, an area of dunes, beaches and wetlands that for a long time formed part of large estancias and of the old, extensive General Lavalle district. The name 'Tuyú' is of Indigenous origin — with Guaraní/pampas roots — and refers to this portion of the Buenos Aires shore, historically tied to ranching, marshes and the vast Bahía de Samborombón.
Through the 18th and 19th centuries, this low, flood-prone land, cut through by streams and crab flats, was the domain of cattle estancias and a very sparse population. The Bahía de Samborombón, with its grasslands and wetlands, was a rugged, nearly unpopulated place, a refuge for wildlife such as the pampas deer and a stopover for migratory birds.
The coast itself, with its live dunes facing the Atlantic, remained practically untouched for a long time, outside any development, until the beach-tourism boom in 20th-century Argentina began to transform this northern shoreline.
As the 20th century advanced and beach tourism gained ground in Argentina — driven by the same process that boosted Mar del Plata and, later, Villa Gesell and Pinamar — one beach town after another began to appear along the Tuyú coast, the result of subdividing coastal land and gradually building on dunes that until then had known only the wind and the cattle estancias. That is how a long, almost unbroken line of adjoining summer villages was born, from San Clemente del Tuyú in the north to Mar de Ajó in the south, including Las Toninas, Santa Teresita, Mar del Tuyú, Costa del Este, Aguas Verdes, La Lucila del Mar and San Bernardo, among others, forming one of the densest concentrations of adjoining beach towns on the whole Argentine coast.
Each town developed its own look, but all shared the profile of a family summer village, aimed at middle-class travelers who arrived by car or on the long-distance coaches that multiplied their departures from mid-century. The building of houses, hotels, cabins and campsites went with that growth, while the relative closeness to Buenos Aires — shorter than the run to Mar del Plata — and affordable prices made the area one of the most popular summer options for Argentine families of modest means.
Costa del Este in particular developed with a strong emphasis on tree planting and urban planning, with species such as maritime pine and eucalyptus fixing the dunes and shading its streets, which gave it its characteristic leafy, tidy look of a quiet garden village, setting it apart from the other towns in the area and anticipating, on a smaller scale, the same landscape approach that made Cariló and Mar de las Pampas famous further south.
The population and tourism growth of this strip of beach towns led, in 1978, to the creation of the Partido de la Costa, which split from the General Lavalle district in order to administer this group of beach villages independently. It was a recognition of the economic and demographic weight the area had reached thanks to summer tourism.
Mar del Tuyú was designated the seat of the new district, taking on the region's administrative role despite not being the largest or best-known beach town. That institutional function gave it a particular profile, combining local government business with its role as a beach destination.
The creation of the district brought order to the area's development and consolidated its identity as one of the country's great affordable tourism hubs. What had been a land of estancias and dunes became, in a few decades, a run of beach towns with a life of their own, services and tourist infrastructure.
Taken together, the beach towns of the Partido de la Costa built an identity as a serene, family destination, without the crowds or the heavy nightlife of other tourist centers such as Mar del Plata or Pinamar. The emphasis was always on wide beaches with calm, shallow water — a geographical quirk of the northern Tuyú that makes them especially safe for young children to swim in — on rest, on fishing and on affordable prices, aimed at people looking for a simple, cheap holiday by the sea, often repeated year after year by the same families.
Nearby attractions such as San Clemente del Tuyú — the gateway to the coast and home of Mundo Marino, the largest oceanarium in South America, opened in 1979 and over time one of the country's leading attractions for family audiences — and the vast Bahía de Samborombón, with its wetlands and its wealth of wildlife and birds (declared a Ramsar site of international importance and a refuge for the threatened pampas deer), rounded out and reinforced the area's tourist profile, adding nature and entertainment beyond the beach itself.
Today, Mar del Tuyú, Costa del Este and the other Tuyú beach towns remain one of Argentina's great affordable summer destinations, faithful to that identity of a quiet, family beach within reach of many, which has defined them from their origins as a run of subdivisions on bare dunes through to their consolidation as one of the longest and most popular tourist corridors on the Buenos Aires coast.