Rosario

Rosario has no founder and no founding date. The area was settled slowly in the 18th century as the Pago de los Arroyos, the land of the streams; a parish church stood on the site of today's cathedral from 1731, and the settlement is usually dated to 1793, when it had a few hundred inhabitants. On 27 February 1812 General Manuel Belgrano raised the newly created Argentine flag for the first time on the banks of the Paraná here, and Rosario has called itself the cradle of the flag ever since.

The town was declared a city in 1852. Rosas had shut the port to foreign trade in 1841; after his fall Rosario became the export port for the grain of the Pampas and grew at speed: by 1887 it had about 50,000 people, 40 per cent of them European immigrants, and by 1926 more than 400,000, almost half foreign-born. The immigrants made it a politically progressive city, in contrast to the more conservative provincial capital, Santa Fe.

The 20th century brought industry and hard times too: in 1995 unemployment in the area reached 21 per cent. The Socialist Party governed the city from 1989 to 2019, and the riverbank, long closed off by port and railway land, was opened as a chain of parks. The Flag Memorial was inaugurated in 1957 and the Rosario–Victoria Bridge in 2003. From the 1990s the city became a centre of the drug trade, and gang violence made it the most violent large city in Argentina, with 2022 the worst year on record.

Rosario is the city of the flag, and its identity is built around the memorial and the river. It is also known as the birthplace of Che Guevara, born here in 1928, and of the footballers Lionel Messi and Ángel Di María, whose murals appear around the city. In December 2022 more than 700,000 people gathered at the Flag Memorial to celebrate Argentina's World Cup win.

Football is close to a religion. Newell's Old Boys, who play in Parque de la Independencia, and Rosario Central, from Arroyito in the north, share one of the fiercest rivalries in the country, dividing the city's loyalties. Music matters too: in the 1980s the Trova rosarina, launched by Juan Carlos Baglietto's album Tiempos difíciles, brought a generation of local songwriters to the whole country, among them Fito Páez, now one of Argentina's best-known musicians.

The city has a large university population, about 70,000 students, a strong theatre and arts scene, and cultural centres in converted port buildings along the river. The riverbank is the shared living room: on warm evenings rosarinos walk, run and drink mate along the costanera, and on summer weekends they cross to the islands or crowd the beach at La Florida.

About a million people live in the city, and about 1.46 million in Greater Rosario, the third-largest urban area in Argentina, according to the 2022 census. The metropolitan area spreads along the Paraná to the north and south but not east, where the river and its islands begin.

The economy is the Pampas' grain trade: the ports of Greater Rosario are among the world's largest exporters of grain, flour and vegetable oils, and the region also makes cars, food-industry machinery and bus bodies. Services, banking and the universities employ many more. Wealth divides sharply between the comfortable central districts and poor settlements on the city's edges, where most of the violence has been concentrated.

Daily life follows the Argentine rhythm of late dinners and long weekends around the asado, football and the river. Insecurity has been a dominant local issue since the late 2000s, alongside inflation and jobs; between 2021 and 2022 the city was also repeatedly covered by smoke from fires in the wetlands of the Paraná delta.

Rosario's own contribution to Argentine food is the carlito, a toasted sandwich of ham and cheese with ketchup, eaten in bars and cafés at any hour. Beyond it, the city eats the classics of the Pampas: asado on Sundays, milanesas, empanadas and big pizzas, washed down with chopp, draught beer.

The river gives Rosario a second tradition. Fish from the Paraná — surubí, a large catfish, boga and pacú — are a feature of the city's cooking, and the town of Victoria across the delta is at the centre of the river fishing industry. Chupín, a stew of river fish such as surubí, belongs to the same river tradition.

The bakeries sell facturas and medialunas for breakfast and merienda, and the alfajor santafesino of the province — round biscuits filled with dulce de leche and coated in Italian meringue — is the province's own. Pichincha and the converted warehouses of the riverfront are where the city goes to eat and drink out.