Pampas & Beaches historical timeline

The Pampas is where Argentina’s wealth was made and where its central national myth was manufactured.

Horses and cattle on the loose

The first Spanish attempt at Buenos Aires in 1536 failed and was abandoned, leaving horses and cattle behind. On grassland with no predators and no competition they multiplied astonishingly, and by the eighteenth century enormous feral herds roamed the plain. That accident created both the resource and the way of life that exploited it.

The gaucho era

Men of mixed descent lived off the wild herds, taking hides and tallow, moving constantly and owing allegiance to nobody. The state regarded them as vagrants, required them to carry work papers, and conscripted them into frontier forts against the indigenous peoples of the plain.

Conquest and fencing

The Conquest of the Desert from 1878 broke indigenous resistance and opened the whole plain. Barbed wire, the railway and refrigerated shipping arrived within the same generation, and the open range ended. Land went to a small number of owners in vast blocks.

The export boom

From the 1880s to 1914 Argentina fed Europe, and the money built Buenos Aires. Immigrants arrived in millions, and the country was for a period among the wealthiest in the world.

Charles Darwin on the plain

The Beagle’s young naturalist rode across this country in 1833, staying with gauchos, hunting rhea and watching Rosas’s campaign against the indigenous peoples at first hand. He recorded the fossil mammals eroding from the cliffs, the feral cattle, and the way introduced species had overwhelmed the native ones — observations that fed directly into what he published a quarter of a century later.

Since

The twentieth century was a long argument about who the wealth belonged to. Soy replaced much of the cattle from the 1990s, and the region remains the country’s economic engine and its most contested political ground.