Pinamar

The dunes and the lands of Felicitas Guerrero

Before Pinamar there was neither town nor forest: only dunes. This whole strip of the Buenos Aires Atlantic coast was a desert of live dunes that the sea wind pushed relentlessly inland, burying whatever lay in its path. It was a wild and beautiful landscape, but hostile to any permanent settlement.

This land had famous owners. It belonged to Martín de Alzaga, a landowner who in 1862 married Felicitas Guerrero, one of the most remembered women in 19th-century Argentine history, as much for her beauty as for her tragic end. When Alzaga died in 1870, Felicitas inherited these coastal fields. Her figure stayed attached to the area forever, and her surname — Guerrero — would later reappear in the names of the towns and of the women behind the founding of Pinamar.

After Felicitas died, the land passed to her heirs, the Guerrero family. For decades it remained unproductive dunes facing the sea. But in the early 20th century an idea began to take shape that would change everything: taming the dunes by planting trees. That intuition, first tried out in what is now Cariló, would be the seed of the future garden city beside the sea.

Ostende and the Belgian dream

The first attempt to create a beach resort on this coast was not Pinamar but Ostende, today one of the towns in the district. In 1908 the Belgians Fernando Robette and Agustín Poli arrived on these beaches and bought land with the idea of building a sophisticated seaside city inspired by Ostend, the famous Belgian resort whose name evokes the 'east end'. On 6 April 1913 the founding ceremony was held and a big campaign was launched to sell the plots.

The project moved ahead enthusiastically: a pier was built, along with the Hotel Termas — today known as the Viejo Hotel Ostende — and work began on the Rambla Sur, a long seafront promenade with steps down to the sea and changing rooms, designed in the style of the great European resorts. Illustrious figures passed through: at different times the old hotel hosted the writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares.

The First World War wrecked that dream: many of the European immigrants involved went back to the old continent and the ambitious project was put on hold. Ostende survived as a quiet beach town with a history, valued today precisely for its gentle profile and the traces of that pioneering era. Years later, in a different context, the founding of neighbouring Pinamar would give the whole area its decisive push.

Jorge Bunge and the fixing of the dunes

The great transformation of the dunes into a town was the work of a man with a clear idea: the engineer and architect Jorge Bunge. Trained in Europe — he graduated from the Royal Polytechnic in Munich, Germany — and regarded as one of Argentina's first professional urban planners, Bunge knew the European techniques for fixing dunes through planting. The intuition was not entirely new here: as early as 1918 Héctor Guerrero, Felicitas's nephew, had begun fixing and planting the dunes on his estancia, in what would in time become Cariló (whose name means 'green dune' in Mapuche).

In August 1940, Bunge presented at his Buenos Aires studio the first draft of his great urban plan. His idea was to create a 'garden city' that respected the topography: instead of levelling the dunes, the layout of streets and blocks would adapt to the natural undulations of the sand. To make it happen he formed the company Pinamar S.A. together with Valeria Guerrero — owner of the dunes — and a group of partners, businesspeople and professionals who believed in the project.

The first steps came in 1940 with surveys and essential works, and from 1941 the fixing and planting of the dunes began at scale, with methods unprecedented in the country. Pines and other species were planted to halt the advance of the sand, a task that took years: left to themselves, the dunes moved inland with the wind. Out of that patient battle against the sand came the forest that now defines Pinamar and Cariló, and that gave the place its unmistakable character of pine wood beside the sea.

Pinamar is born, the garden city beside the sea

On 14 February 1943, with much of the dunes already fixed and the forest under way, Pinamar was officially opened as a beach resort, and shortly afterwards the Master Plan of Urbanisation designed by Jorge Bunge was approved. The name said it all: 'pino' and 'mar', pine and sea, the two souls of a place that had literally been born of planting trees on the sand facing the ocean. The curving layout of its streets, winding along with the undulations of the terrain, is the visible mark of that idea of respecting the nature of the dune.

Over the years the bet paid off. Pinamar grew as a summer destination, drawing families and, in time, a public that turned it into one of the most popular — and in part most exclusive — resorts on the Argentine Atlantic coast. Cariló, with its unpaved sand streets and its houses among the pines, established itself as the most sophisticated corner; Valeria del Mar and Ostende kept their quiet, family profile, and central Pinamar, around Avenida Bunge — named in honour of the founder —, became the commercial and social heart.

In 1978, Pinamar was constituted as a district of its own, splitting from General Madariaga, made up of Pinamar, Ostende, Valeria del Mar and Cariló. Today that cluster of towns between forest and sea is living proof of a bold idea: that a town could be built where there had been only shifting dunes. The forest that fixed the sand keeps growing, and every summer thousands of visitors enjoy, often without knowing it, the dream that Jorge Bunge and his partners planted on the dunes more than eighty years ago.

Since the 1990s, Pinamar and above all Cariló added a chapter of media fame: they became the summer destination of choice for much of Argentina's political, business and artistic class, which multiplied the press coverage of their tree-lined streets every January and cemented an image as the 'top' resort on the Atlantic coast. That fame always coexisted with the other side of Pinamar, less often mentioned on the entertainment shows: a family-friendly, sporty destination that is affordable in low season, when the forest falls silent and the beaches, almost empty, recover the wild air the original dunes had before Bunge and his partners decided to tame them.

📚 Bibliography

• Municipalidad de Pinamar — «Historia»: https://pinamar.gob.ar/historia/
• Pinamar Turismo — «Historia de Pinamar»: https://www.pinamarturismo.com.ar/historia-pinamar.html
• La Nación — «Inspirado en las playas francesas: cómo un emprendedor y una mujer audaz crearon el más exclusivo balneario»: https://www.lanacion.com.ar/lifestyle/inspirado-en-las-playas-francesas-como-un-emprendedor-y-una-mujer-audaz-crearon-el-mas-exclusivo-nid14012025/
• La Nación — «La historia detrás de los pinos de Pinamar»: https://www.lanacion.com.ar/sociedad/la-historia-detras-de-los-pinos-de-pinamar-nid1657940/
• Wikipedia — «Ostende (Argentina)»: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostende_(Argentina)
• Infobae — «Ostende: un recorrido por 9 íconos que cuentan la historia de la localidad más antigua de Pinamar»: https://www.infobae.com/sociedad/2023/01/20/ostende-un-recorrido-por-9-iconos-que-cuentan-la-historia-de-la-localidad-mas-antigua-de-pinamar/
• Wikipedia — «Cariló»: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caril%C3%B3
• Fundación COLSECOR — «Pinamar»: https://www.fundacioncolsecor.org.ar/comunidades/pinamar-n12934