Pinamar

In the 19th century this stretch of the Atlantic coast was a belt of bare, moving dunes, part of the estates of Felicitas Guerrero, which later passed to her family. Early attempts at resorts struggled with the sand: at Ostende, founded in 1913 by the Belgian Fernando Robette and the Italian Agustín Poli, the dunes buried much of the promenade. To the south, Héctor Manuel Guerrero began planting pines on his land in the early 1920s, the start of the forest of Cariló.

In the late 1930s the architect Jorge Bunge formed a partnership with Valeria Guerrero, owner of the dunes north of Ostende. From 1941 the company fixed the sand on a large scale with pines and other trees, and Bunge drew a town plan whose curving streets followed the shape of the dunes. Pinamar opened as a resort on 14 February 1943, the provincial government approved the master plan in 1944, and the first lots were sold in 1945, the year the church, school, golf course and first pier were completed. A railway service from Buenos Aires ran from 1949 to 1967.

Valeria Guerrero founded Valeria del Mar on her own land in 1947, and Cariló was later divided into lots. Bunge died in 1961. In 1978 the resorts were separated from General Madariaga to form a new municipality, renamed the Partido de Pinamar in 1983, which takes in Pinamar, Ostende, Valeria del Mar and Cariló. The town has kept a strict building code.

Pinamar is above all a summer place. The town's identity rests on Bunge's plan — low houses with open gardens set among trees — and on its reputation as one of the more fashionable resorts on the coast, popular with families from Buenos Aires who return to the same street and the same beach club every year. Cariló, with its forest and unpaved lanes, has an even quieter and more exclusive image.

Summer brings a calendar of shows and concerts. The Teatro Municipal de la Torre and the Cine-Teatro Oasis stage theatre during the season, a free weekly series of meetings with Argentine writers runs through January and February, and Cariló holds a long-running series of concerts in its hotels and tennis club. The town has also hosted a film meeting between Argentine and European cinema organised with the national film institute, INCAA.

Life outdoors is the point: surfing, bodyboarding, windsurfing and sailing at sea, sport fishing from boats leaving the pier, golf on the district's courses, and riding, cycling and walking in the forest. Residents and visitors take pride in the trees, and local campaigns have pressed for rules to keep plastic off the beaches.

The Partido de Pinamar, which takes in the four towns, had 39,449 residents at the 2022 census. The population rises many times over in summer, when the district receives well over a million visitors across the season, and falls back to a small-town routine from autumn to spring, when many shops, restaurants and beach clubs close.

Tourism and the services that support it are the economy, and many residents work hard during the summer months to carry them through the year. Most homes are detached houses in gardens, and the town's strict planning rules and the protection of the forest are part of local life. Traffic, on the streets and on the beaches, is the summer complaint.

Out of season the pace is slow: people walk dogs on the empty beach, the forest is quiet, and weekend visitors from Buenos Aires keep some places open. The loss of the passenger train service in 2025 left the town depending on roads and long-distance buses.

Pinamar eats in the Argentine coastal manner: parrillas grilling beef, chorizo and morcilla, pizzerias and pasta houses, and seafood such as rabas, fried squid rings. Long evenings end at heladerías, ice-cream shops making Italian-style ice cream, where dulce de leche, milk caramel, is the favourite flavour.

The beach day has its own food: sandwiches and snacks from the beach clubs, facturas, the sweet pastries from the bakeries, and mate passed round under the tents. Medialunas, small sweet croissants, with coffee are the standard breakfast and afternoon merienda.

Avenida Bunge and the streets around it hold most of the town's restaurants and cafés, and Cariló's galleries among the pines have their own cluster of cafés and restaurants. Many visitors rent houses with their own grill, and the family asado in the garden, with beef, sausages and salad shared slowly over the afternoon, is as much a part of a Pinamar summer as any restaurant meal.