Buenos Aires

Before the Spanish arrived, the grasslands around the Río de la Plata were home to hunter-gatherers known to the colonists as the Querandí. Pedro de Mendoza founded the first Buenos Aires in 1536, but hunger and attacks forced its abandonment within a few years; Juan de Garay refounded the city in 1580. For two centuries it was a small port, forbidden by Spanish trade rules from dealing openly with Europe and living on smuggling, until it became capital of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776.

Local militias repelled two British invasions in 1806 and 1807, and the May Revolution of 1810 began in the city's cabildo. The long struggle between Buenos Aires and the other provinces over customs revenue ended in 1880, when the city was made the federal capital; the province built a new capital, La Plata, laid out on a planned grid in 1882. Mar del Plata was founded in 1874 and grew into the seaside resort of the elite.

Between the 1880s and 1930 immigrants, above all from Italy and Spain, crowded into the port barrios and turned Buenos Aires into one of the largest cities in the Americas. Plaza de Mayo became the stage of national politics: the workers' march for Perón on 17 October 1945, the bombing of the square in 1955, and from 1977 the Thursday marches of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo for those disappeared under the dictatorship. The bombings of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the AMIA Jewish centre in 1994 hit the city hard. A 1994 constitutional reform made the capital autonomous, with its own elected head of government from 1996.

People from the city call themselves porteños — people of the port — and those from the province bonaerenses, and the difference matters locally. The porteño accent, with its "sh" sounds and Italian-like cadence, is laced with lunfardo, an old slang that began among prisoners and is preserved in tango lyrics. Tango itself, which grew up in the barrios along the river at the end of the 19th century, is listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage together with Uruguay, and is danced today in milongas in Almagro, Palermo and San Telmo as well as staged for visitors.

Football divides the city between dozens of clubs, above all Boca Juniors of La Boca and River Plate of Núñez, whose Superclásico stops Buenos Aires. The café is an institution, and the city protects many old ones as cafés notables. Filete porteño, the curling painted lettering on shop signs and old lorries, is also on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. The city has more bookshops per head than any other, the largest concentration of theatres in Latin America, and is a major centre of psychoanalysis.

Out on the pampas the culture is gaucho: horsemanship, silver-worked belts and knives, folk music and the asado. San Antonio de Areco, where Ricardo Güiraldes set his novel Don Segundo Sombra, celebrates the Día de la Tradición each November with parades of riders.

About 3 million people live in the city proper, and roughly 15 million in Greater Buenos Aires, the sprawl of suburban partidos known as the conurbano. The province as a whole has about 17 million people. Other centres are La Plata, the provincial capital and a university city; Mar del Plata, with over 600,000 in its district; Bahía Blanca, a port and energy hub in the south; and farming towns such as Tandil, Azul and Pergamino.

The capital lives on services, government, finance, media and the port, and the conurbano on industry, while the province's pampas produce much of the country's soybeans, wheat, maize and beef. Wealth divides sharply: comfortable barrios in the north of the city sit a short drive from informal settlements, the villas, on the city's edges.

Days start late and end later. Offices fill by nine, lunch is often a quick menú, the afternoon brings coffee and medialunas, and dinner is rarely before nine or ten. Weekends revolve around the asado, football and the plazas. In January the city empties towards the Atlantic coast. Inflation, prices and jobs dominate conversation, and protests and strikes are a routine part of city life.

The parrilla is the centre of eating in Buenos Aires: bife de chorizo (sirloin strip), vacío (flank), entraña (skirt steak), morcilla (blood sausage) and mollejas (sweetbreads), grilled over wood or charcoal and served with chimichurri. The choripán, a grilled chorizo in bread, is the food of football grounds, building sites and street stalls, and provoleta is provolone grilled until it melts.

The Italian inheritance shows in the pizzerias of Avenida Corrientes, which serve thick, cheesy pizza de molde, fugazzeta stuffed with cheese and topped with onion, and fainá, a chickpea flatbread laid on top of a slice. Bakeries sell facturas, the pastries eaten with coffee or mate, and medialunas, small sweet croissants. Heladerías serve Italian-style ice cream late into the night, with dulce de leche the favourite flavour.

On the coast, Mar del Plata is known for rabas, fried squid rings, and for the Havanna brand of alfajores, dulce de leche sandwich biscuits coated in chocolate, founded in the city in 1947. Vermouth has returned to fashion in the capital's bars, and Fernet with cola is drunk everywhere.

In Buenos Aires, Plaza de Mayo gathers the pink Casa Rosada, the colonial Cabildo and the Metropolitan Cathedral, where San Martín is buried, with Avenida de Mayo and the Café Tortoni leading to the Congreso. The Obelisco stands on the wide Avenida 9 de Julio near the Teatro Colón, one of the great opera houses. To the south, San Telmo's cobbled streets hold a Sunday street fair, and La Boca has the painted houses of Caminito and Boca's stadium, La Bombonera. To the north lie Recoleta's cemetery, where Eva Perón lies in the Duarte family tomb, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the MALBA and the parks of Palermo; Puerto Madero's old docks now hold towers and restaurants.

Tigre, reached by train from Retiro, is the gateway to the Paraná delta, whose islands are served by wooden launches and dotted with houses on stilts; its Puerto de Frutos market and the Tigre Art Museum sit in the town. La Plata has its Gothic-revival cathedral and a natural history museum, and Luján's basilica is a major Catholic pilgrimage site.

Inland, working and guest estancias on the pampas offer riding and asados, many near San Antonio de Areco; the low hills of Tandil and the Sierra de la Ventana break the flat land further south. The Atlantic beaches run south from San Clemente del Tuyú through Pinamar and Villa Gesell to Mar del Plata, with its casino, Rambla, cliffs and fishing port, and on to Necochea.