🇦🇷 Argentina · Buenos Aires
Miramar is a seaside town on the Buenos Aires Atlantic Coast, known as 'the children's town' for its quiet, family character, about 45 km south of Mar del Plata, in the General Alvarado district. Surrounded by an extensive forest, it offers wide beaches, a peaceful atmosphere and an ideal setup for a family holiday, far from the bustle of the big resorts.
Its great hallmark is the combination of sea and forest: the Vivero Dunícola Florentino Ameghino, a huge planted forest that reaches almost to the sea, wraps around the town and gives it a fresh, green feel that is rare on this coast. Miramar also has its seafront promenade, its quiet pace, the nearby bluffs and the beach village of Mar del Sud, and curiosities such as the fossil remains along its shore.
This guide covers the essentials of Miramar: the beaches and the promenade, the Vivero Ameghino woods, family outings, nearby trips (Mar del Sud, the bluffs), coastal food and how to get there. A destination for anyone after beach, nature and family quiet on the Buenos Aires Atlantic Coast.
Miramar was founded in 1888 as a seaside resort on the Buenos Aires Atlantic Coast, in the General Alvarado district. Quiet and family-minded, it earned the nickname 'the children's town'. Its great distinguishing feature is the forest of the Vivero Florentino Ameghino, which reaches almost to the sea, the result of planting up the dunes in the early 20th century. Its shoreline also holds important paleontological finds linked to the work of the naturalist Florentino Ameghino. 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.
The name Miramar wasn't born in Argentina but on the shores of the Adriatic: in late 1887, its founders chose to christen the fledgling seaside town 'Mira-Mar' in homage to Miramare Castle in Trieste, residence of Emperor Maximilian of Austria and one of the most prestigious resorts in the world at the time. It was an ambitious bet from the name onwards: they wanted a destination on a par with the great European resorts, planted in the middle of the Buenos Aires dunes.
The idea had started in mid-1887, when José María Dupuy persuaded his brother-in-law Fortunato de la Plaza to found a seaside town on land he owned. The layout was left to the engineer Rómulo Otamendi, who sent the surveyor Eugenio Moy to measure the ground and draw up the plan of streets, squares and plots, taking as a model the city of La Plata, founded barely five years earlier. On February 21, 1888, De la Plaza brought his acquaintances to see the future settlement, an event that echoed in the press of the day; soon afterwards the first shops went up, along with the courthouse and police building, the seat of the Sociedad Española de Socorros Mutuos, the school, the telegraph and the power station. On September 20, 1888, the government of the province of Buenos Aires approved the plans and issued the official founding decree.
Growth was fast by the standards of the time: in 1889 work began on the church, on land donated by De la Plaza himself, who made the apostle Saint Andrew its patron; by 1890, barely two years after the founding decree, Miramar already had a school, a justice of the peace, a hotel and 860 inhabitants. From its origins the town took on a quieter, more family-minded character than its neighbor Mar del Plata, a hallmark that in time would earn it the nickname 'the children's town' and set it apart for good from the noisier resorts on the coast.
Miramar's most distinctive feature — its huge forest — isn't natural but the result of a remarkable planting effort. Over the course of the 20th century, trees were planted on the dunes surrounding the town, as part of the drive to fix the sand and create green space on a naturally bare, sandy coast. The result was the Vivero Dunícola Florentino Ameghino, an extensive forest that wraps around the town and reaches almost to the sea.
This forest, with thousands of trees of various species, transformed the look of Miramar and gave it a unique identity on the Atlantic Coast: the combination of beach and forest, of sea and shade, rare in a region of resorts built on dunes. The Vivero became a great green lung and a recreation space — for walking, cycling, picnicking and watching nature — and is today one of the town's chief points of pride and one of its main draws.
The vivero's name pays tribute to Florentino Ameghino, the famous Argentine naturalist and paleontologist, deeply tied to the region through his research on the fossils of the Pampas shoreline. That link joins two of Miramar's great attractions: the forest that defines it and the paleontological wealth of its coast, both associated with Ameghino and with the natural history of the area.
A few kilometers south of Miramar, the village of Mar del Sud holds one of the most fascinating and melancholy stories on the Atlantic Coast: that of the Hotel Boulevard Atlántico. Building work began in the second half of the 19th century, when a group of investors organized in the Banco Constructor de La Plata SA decided to raise the Mar del Sur resort on land in the General Alvarado district. The Hungarian banker and accountant Carlos Mauricio Schweitzer (1843-1892) drove the construction of this imposing European-style building, which finally opened in 1888 — the same year Miramar was born, though to a very different fate.
The hotel, neoclassical in style, had 76 rooms, a grand dining room, pitch pine floors, courtyards with galleries, black slate roofs, two tennis courts, a bocce court and a football pitch: all designed for a summer elite that never quite arrived in numbers. Tragedy came quickly: on January 11, 1892, Schweitzer took his own life, and shortly afterwards the bank went under as a result of the 1890 financial crisis. The railway, which was to be the means of mass access for holidaymakers, never reached Mar del Sud. All that was left of that ambitious project was that colossal, newly opened building, in the middle of a desert of dunes.
The hotel did, however, have some extraordinary chapters before falling into neglect. Soon after opening it sheltered hundreds of Jewish immigrants fleeing Tsarist Russia around 1891: they reached Buenos Aires on the steamer Pampa and, after traveling by train to Mar del Plata, arrived at Mar del Sud in a caravan of sixty carts. Decades later, during the Second World War, there are accounts placing a German espionage center there, linked to the businessman Karl Gustav Einckenberg, who is said to have bought land near the coast as a contact point for Nazi agents. Declared a Municipal Historic Monument, the building stood closed for years, half-ruined and loaded with local legends, until in 2023 it partly reopened its doors, first as a tearoom and later with its dining area, in an attempt to rescue this symbol of a broken seaside dream from oblivion.
The shoreline of Miramar and its bluffs hold a valuable paleontological record: numerous fossils of the megafauna that roamed the pampa thousands of years ago have been found along the coast and in the cliffs, such as glyptodons (enormous armored relatives of armadillos), megatheriums (giant ground sloths) and other mammals now extinct. This fossil wealth, studied since Florentino Ameghino's day, made the region a site of scientific interest and an educational draw, which can be explored in museums and on guided walks.
Over the 20th century, Miramar cemented its profile as a quiet family resort, a serene alternative to the crowds of Mar del Plata. Its growth kept that easy character, with the promenade, the center, the wide beaches and the forest as the axes of tourist life. The town won a loyal following of families who come back year after year, drawn by its safe atmosphere and its combination of sea and greenery.
Today's Miramar is still, above all, 'the children's town': a destination of beach, nature and family quiet on the Buenos Aires Atlantic Coast. To its offer of sea and forest it adds the nearby trips — such as rustic Mar del Sud and the fossil-bearing bluffs — and an unhurried pace that sets it apart. From a resort founded in 1888 to an established family destination, Miramar keeps intact its serene charm and its unique identity as a beach among the trees.