Pampas & Beaches Culture & Language

Pampas culture is gaucho culture, preserved partly as living practice and partly as national symbol.

The gaucho inheritance

What survives is real work and real craft. Silverwork — belt discs, knife handles, mate gourds, horse gear — is made at Areco to a standard that has not dropped, and the facon, the gaucho knife worn at the small of the back, is still carried and used. Boleadoras, the weighted cords thrown to bring down cattle, are still thrown at festivals. The dress — bombacha trousers, wide belt, neckerchief, flat hat — is what men in country towns actually wear.

The asado

Not a barbecue. Beef and offal cooked slowly over wood embers by one person who does nothing else for three hours, eaten in a specific order, with the asador’s competence a matter of reputation.

Payadas

Improvised sung verse duels to guitar, in which two payadores answer each other in rhyme — a tradition going back to the eighteenth century and still performed.

Pulperias

The country store and bar, a few of which survive in their original form at Areco and Mercedes.

Pato

The national sport, and almost nobody outside Argentina has heard of it. Riders at full gallop contest a leather ball with six handles, passing and shooting it into a vertical netted hoop — polo and basketball on horseback. It was played on the pampas from the seventeenth century in a form violent enough to be banned repeatedly, and was codified and declared the national sport in 1953.

Mate

Constant, and the plain is where the habit is most deeply set.

Spanish in its Argentine form, and specifically the rioplatense variety of Buenos Aires and its province — vos instead of tu with its own verb endings, the ll and y pronounced as a soft sh, and an intonation that Spanish speakers elsewhere identify instantly as Italian-influenced.

Lunfardo, the Buenos Aires slang that grew in the immigrant tenements and entered tango lyrics, colours everyday speech across the region — laburo for work, mina for woman, quilombo for a mess.

English is spoken in Buenos Aires and in the coastal resorts, and less so in the country towns.

Italian surnames outnumber Spanish ones across much of the plain, though the language itself has largely gone.

Useful: hola, gracias, cuanto sale, la cuenta, dale, and che, which is how Argentines address each other and is where Guevara got his nickname.