History
The first attempt to establish a settlement on the banks of the River Plate estuary took place twenty years after the region had been discovered by the Portuguese navigator Juan de Solis. In 1536, the Spanish aristocrat Pedro de Mendoza founded the settlement of Nuestra Senora de Santa Maria del Buen Aire , named after the patron saint of sailors - provider of the buen aire , or good wind. Mendoza's expedition was composed of 1600 men, three times the number that had accompanied Cortes in his conquest of Mexico sixteen years previously. To some extent, it was the very size of Mendoza's expedition that proved its downfall: they arrived too late in the year to sow crops and attempts to co-opt the native nomadic Indians into gathering supplies for the party proved understandably unsuccessful. With little foodstuff available to them, apart from fish, and under mounting attacks from a now hostile Indian population, the settlers were forced to abandon the settlement after five years - though not before many of them had starved to death or been killed by Indians (only eighteen months after its arrival, the party had already been reduced by two thirds). The remaining settlers fled upriver to Asuncion del Paraguay, which had been founded by a section of Mendoza's party in 1537, leaving behind a granary and a few horses which soon multiplied on the fertile grasslands of the pampa. Forty years passed before an expedition led by Juan de Garay headed back down the Parana River and, in 1580, refounded the city . This time around, the enterprise proved successful: provisions were now available from Asuncion - where the settlers had encountered a more co-operative group of indigenous inhabitants and had managed to sow crops - and Santa Fe, founded by Garay on his way downriver. With cattle, cereal and horses available from these other sources, Garay's men did not need to resort to the co-ercive tactics employed earlier, and relations with the local Indians were more peaceful, if not entirely trouble free. Thus the tiny settlement began a period of slow but steady expansion . Nonetheless, its early growth was hampered by colonial restrictions on the flow of commerce to and from the River Plate region. The Spanish crown had supported the second founding of Buenos Aires primarily as a military garrison, and was anxious that the new settlement should not flourish as a port and thus allow non-Spanish goods to flood into its colonial markets. Buenos Aires protested bitterly to Spain throughout the seventeenth century, complaining that trade restrictions were impeding the city's growth. To some extent, however, it was colonial restrictions that sparked the ascendancy of Buenos Aires. Deprived of a stable source of imports and income, the city turned to contraband - primarily exporting silver from the mines of Potosi, in Upper Peru (now Bolivia) in exchange for slaves and manufactured goods from Portugal. The city's strategic location helped too: lying at the mouth of the River Plate, it was the logical point of entry for commerce from Europe, as well as being in a position to control trade with the Littoral provinces further up the Parana and Uruguay rivers which merge in the waters of the mighty estuary. By the mid-eighteenth century, Buenos Aires had 12,000 inhabitants, twice as many as any city in the interior. Trade relations with Spain also improved as crown policy switched from attempting to stifle commerce to competing with rivals by drastically increasing imports. Nonetheless, the Spanish grip on the New World was weakening. The last attempt to shore up the empire came with the Bourbon reforms of the late eighteenth century; in 1776 Spain gave the Argentine territories the status of Viceroyalty of the River Plate, with Buenos Aires as the capital. Trade was further liberalized with the introduction of the comercio libre (free trade) under which the old trading monopolies were abolished, along with various taxes. But though comercio libre marked an improvement on Spain's previous stranglehold on commerce, it proved to be misleadingly named. The aim was not to encourage all trade, but specifically that between the various colonies and Spain: foreign goods were only legally available as re-exports through Spain, and then with punitive tariffs applied to them. Yet in spite of these taxes, foreign goods were still sufficiently higher in quality or lower in price to ensure their dominance - either as re-exports or contraband. Spain's military conflicts with the British and the Portuguese during the late eighteenth century further weakened colonial commercial links - as Spain showed itself unable to keep its colonies supplied with goods. Independence , declared in 1816 and consolidated during the 1820s, freed the new capital from the last vestiges of colonial hindrance, but Buenos Aires maintained a rather tenuous grip over a country bitterly divided between unitarians and federalists. The real turning point came with the federalization of the capital in 1880, when the city was detached from the province and made federal capital of the republic. Combined with the driving back of the frontier to the south of Buenos Aires, through General Roca's infamous Conquest of the Wilderness in 1879, this ratification of Buenos Aires' special status paved the way for a period of phenomenal expansion. Few cities in the world can have experienced a period of such astonishing growth as that which swept Buenos Aires between 1880 and 1914. Finally able to exploit and export the great riches of the pampa thanks to technological advances such as the steam ship and the railway and to massive foreign investment - most notably from the British - Buenos Aires leapt into the ranks of the world's great cities. European immigrants flocked to the capital, whose population doubled from 286,000 to 526,000 between 1880 to 1890, and by 1900 it was the largest city in Latin America with a population of around 800,000. The standard of living of its growing middle classes - the largest of any city in Latin America - equalled or surpassed that of many European countries, whilst the incredible wealth of the city's elite had few parallels anywhere. At the same time, however, much of the large working-class community - many of whom were immigrants - endured appalling conditions in the city's overcrowded conventillos or tenement buildings, in which up to ten people shared a room. And, though the city was becoming a byword for wealth and elegance, Buenos Aires was also earning a less glamorous reputation as the centre of white slave traffic from Europe. This sleazy side notwithstanding, Buenos Aires was still a city of grand ambitions. Remodelled along the lines of Haussmann's Paris in the 1880s - when the parallel avenues Santa Fe, Cordoba, Corrientes and the Avenida de Mayo were constructed, and interconnected by trams, buses and, in the early twentieth century, by Latin America's first underground railway - Buenos Aires had little cause to envy the capitals of the old continent. In 1926, both horrified and impressed by Buenos Aires' incredible dynamism, visiting French architect Le Corbusier felt compelled to describe the city as "a gigantic agglomeration of insatiable energy". By the mid-twentieth century, however, this period of breakneck development had come to a close: the country as a whole was sliding into crisis and growth in the capital declined to match. In fact, since around 1950, the population of Capital Federal has remained more or less constant at around three million. The major addition to the cityscape during this period has been the construction of numerous high-rise apartment blocks, principally in the north and west of the city. In terms of the city's population, the legacy of European immigration remains (around ten percent of the city's population is European born), but the most recent influx of immigrants has been from Argentina's poorer provinces and neighbouring countries, many of whom settle in the capital's growing number of shanty towns. Euphemistically termed villas de emergencia in reference to their supposed temporary status, these shanty towns are more commonly and accurately known as villas miseria . In stark contrast to these pockets of deprivation, the stabilization of the country's currency in the 1990s brought a new upsurge in spending by those who could afford it - and an infrastructure to match. Smart new shopping malls, restaurants and cinema complexes have sprung up around the city and are changing the way many Portenos live. Lofts, sushi bars and drive-in fast-food outlets have all become part of the city's identity, as have secure private housing estates (known as countrys ) on the outskirts of the city. To some extent, this new Buenos Aires has prospered at the expense of the old city: the once bustling centre, for example, is no longer the major focus of cultural and social life. In spite of it all, though, Buenos Aires still feels like a fairly democratic place - the sharp and often shocking divisions of wealth that characterize many other Latin America cities are still far from being a defining feature of Argentina's capital.
Your Tip for Buenos Aires and around
Help other backpackers! Write your own guides and backpacking tips to Buenos Aires and around - they will appear instantly on this page - Please only write a tip/guide to Buenos Aires and around - visit the main Buenos Aires and around forum to ask a question!
Please do not post links to your site here (they won't work) - please use the Buenos Aires and around webguide section below! Thanks.
|
