Argentina

The land was home to many Indigenous peoples — the Diaguita in the northwest, the Guaraní in the northeast, and the Mapuche, Tehuelche, and Selk'nam across the Pampas and Patagonia. Spanish settlement from the sixteenth century left Buenos Aires a smugglers' outpost until 1776, when Spain made it capital of a new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. The May Revolution of 1810 began the break with Spain, and independence was declared at Tucumán in 1816.

Decades of civil war between centralists and federalists followed, easing with the 1853 constitution and settled by the country's reorganisation as a federation in 1880, after which came a long period of growth. Between about 1880 and 1930, millions of European immigrants, Italians and Spaniards above all, arrived, and the military "Conquest of the Desert" seized Patagonia from its Indigenous inhabitants. By 1908 Argentina ranked among the ten wealthiest countries in the world.

The twentieth century was turbulent: a first military coup in 1930, the rise of Juan and Eva Perón in the 1940s and a movement that still defines politics, more coups, and the 1976–83 military dictatorship, whose "Dirty War" disappeared an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 people and which fell after losing the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War. Democracy returned in 1983. Economic crises have recurred — hyperinflation in 1989, a catastrophic default in 2001 — and the tension between Peronism and market reform, sharpened under President Javier Milei since he took office in December 2023, remains the central divide.

Argentina sees itself as a nation of immigrants, and Buenos Aires — the "Paris of South America" in its own telling — dominates the national image, though the Andean northwest, the Litoral, and Patagonia all have strong regional cultures. The country is historically Catholic (Pope Francis was Archbishop of Buenos Aires) but markedly secular in practice, with sizeable Jewish and evangelical communities.

Certain things are near-universal. Mate, the bitter herbal infusion shared from a gourd and metal straw, is drunk everywhere by everyone. Football is a consuming passion, from Maradona and Messi to the Boca–River rivalry and three World Cup titles. Tango, born in the port neighbourhoods in the late nineteenth century, is both a museum piece for tourists and a living social dance in the city's milongas.

The gaucho — the horseman of the Pampas — is the rural national symbol, and the asado, the long weekend barbecue, is its social ritual. Argentina also has an outsized literary tradition (Borges, Cortázar) and an unusual mainstream enthusiasm for psychoanalysis. Human-rights memory, carried by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, runs deep.

More than a quarter of Argentines live in Greater Buenos Aires, a sprawling metropolis of café-lined avenues, bookshops, and apartment blocks. Life runs late: lunch is unhurried, dinner rarely starts before 9 or 10 p.m., and nightclubs fill after 2 a.m. The afternoon merienda of coffee and medialunas bridges the long gap between meals.

Coping with inflation is a daily skill. People hold savings in US dollars, spend pesos quickly, compare prices constantly, and joke about it darkly. Public universities are a national institution, healthcare is universal if uneven, and the café remains a genuine social institution rather than just a place to buy coffee.

Outside the capital, life is quieter and cheaper — provincial cities like Córdoba, Rosario, Mendoza, and Salta, farming towns on the Pampas, and small, spread-out settlements in Patagonia where distances are measured in hundreds of kilometres and the wind is a constant companion.

Beef is the centre of the table. The asado or parrilla runs through cuts like bife de chorizo and asado de tira, plus chorizo, morcilla (blood sausage), and achuras (offal), all eaten with chimichurri. Empanadas, baked or fried and stuffed with meat, cheese, or corn, vary by province, and the milanesa, a breaded cutlet, is the everyday standby.

The Italian inheritance is just as strong: thick, cheese-heavy Buenos Aires pizza, fresh pasta, and ñoquis traditionally eaten on the 29th of the month. Locro, a hearty stew of corn, squash, beans, and meat, has spread from the northwest and Cuyo to the rest of the country. Dulce de leche — milk caramel — is in the alfajores, the ice cream, and the pancakes.

To drink: Malbec from Mendoza and Torrontés from Salta, Fernet mixed with cola, strong espresso, and mate at every hour. Argentine ice cream, made in the Italian style, is among the best in the world and taken seriously.

Two natural wonders bracket the country. In the far northeast, Iguazú Falls — a nearly three-kilometre line of cascades on the Brazilian border, shared as a national park on each side — is the largest waterfall system on Earth. In the far south, the Perito Moreno Glacier in Los Glaciares National Park calves ice into a lake in full view of a boardwalk, and in the park's northern sector the town of El Chaltén sits under the granite spires of Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre, some of the best trekking in South America.

Patagonia holds more: the whale-watching peninsula of Península Valdés, the Welsh-founded towns of Chubut, the Lake District around Bariloche, and Ushuaia, which claims the title of the world's southernmost city and is one of the main gateways to Antarctica. The Andean northwest offers the painted rock strata of the Quebrada de Humahuaca and the blinding Salinas Grandes salt flats; further south, in Cuyo, the wine roads of Mendoza lie beneath Aconcagua, the highest peak outside Asia.

In the west are the desert parks of Talampaya and Ischigualasto (the "Valley of the Moon"); in the northeast, the rewilded Iberá wetlands with their returning jaguars; and in the centre, Córdoba's colonial Jesuit block. And there is Buenos Aires itself — San Telmo's Sunday market, the painted houses of La Boca, the Recoleta cemetery, the Teatro Colón, and the milongas that go on until dawn.