Region Information

La Pampa, extensive grasslands with an endless blue sky, prairies dotted with thousands of heads of cattle and gauchos having mate in the shade of an Ombu tree. The pampas in Argentina are almost unrelentingly flat except for their extensive coastline, several small mountain ranges and the delta of the river de la Plata. It is the agricultural heartland of the country, which involves the provinces of Buenos Aires, La Pampa and large areas of Santa Fé and Córdoba. Within this area, there are a surprising number of tourist attractions.

The aboriginal inhabitants of the pampas were Querandí hunter-gatherers. They resisted the Spanish presence, besieging early settlements and preventing them from establishing any foothold in the area for more than half a century. When the Spaniards abandoned their first settlement at Buenos Aires, they also left behind cattle and horses, which multiplied prodigiously in their absence. After the re-establishment of Buenos Aires, colonial officials informed, that a total of 80,000 heads of cattle per year for trade would not diminish the herds (the number of heads were estimated at 48 million). The wild cattle and horses left an enduring legacy: the culture of the gaucho, which persisted for many decades as a neohunter-gatherer and then as a symbol of "argentinidad", an extreme but romantic Argentine nationalism.

The Buenos Aires province contains several important cities, particularly its capital of La Plata and the Atlantic port of Bahía Blanca. The interior town of San Antonio de Areco, 113km west from Buenos Aires wears the emblem of the gaucho's culture in Argentina, where many colonial, British or French style built estancias provide comfortable accommodation. There are many beach towns along the Atlantic coast, the largest is Mar del Plata, to which Porteños flock each summer.

The La Pampa province is primarily an agricultural zone. It was settled later than the province of Buenos Aires because Indian resistance deterred European incursions much longer and because its erratic rainfall made agriculture more unpredictable than in the humid pampas towards the coast. Santa Rosa is an attractive administrative and service centre, and its little-known Lihue Calel National Park more than justifies a detour from the standard routes to and from Patagonia.