Pampa / Porteño

The grassland that made Argentina rich and the port that took the profits. The pampa is one of the largest expanses of temperate grassland on earth, and it was almost useless to Spain, which found no silver and few settled peoples - Buenos Aires was a smuggling port on the edge of an empire oriented towards Peru. Refrigerated shipping from the 1870s changed that completely: beef and wheat from the pampa made the country one of the ten richest in the world by 1913, drawing six million European immigrants, mostly Italian and Spanish, who arrived through Buenos Aires and largely stayed there. The Conquest of the Desert in the 1870s took the land from the Mapuche and distributed it in very large holdings, so the wealth was concentrated from the start. The tension between the port and the interior provinces over customs revenue ran through the whole nineteenth century and is not resolved. Tango came out of the port districts. Peronism drew its base from the industrial belt around the city. Around a third of Argentines live in greater Buenos Aires. The region covers Buenos Aires province and parts of Santa Fe, Cordoba and La Pampa. It is among the most fertile agricultural land in the world. The gaucho became the national symbol after the way of life had largely ended. Martin Fierro, published in 1872, is the country's founding literary text. Soy has largely displaced cattle on the best land, and the country is among the largest soy exporters in the world.

• Existed: 1580 CE – present
• Type: Entity