Río de la Plata

Argentina and Uruguay face each other across the River Plate and share more than they admit: the mate passed round a circle, the Sunday asado with wood and coarse salt, the tango that UNESCO lists for Buenos Aires and Montevideo together, and a Spanish that says vos sos, acá and che, with Italian in its slang from the immigrants who filled both ports a century ago.

What differs is mostly scale and style. Uruguayans drink the most mate per person and walk the street with a thermos under one arm; Argentines take theirs to work. Lunfardo, the tenement slang that tango made into poetry, is Buenos Aires's own, and so is the Día del Amigo on 20 July, when the city's restaurants fill with friends.

History

History of Río de la Plata: a timeline (15 moments of its history)

Start with

  • 1536–11 June 1580: Buenos Aires is founded, twice — Buenos Aires was founded twice.
  • 1609–1768: The Jesuit missions among the Guaraní — From 1609 the Jesuits gathered Guaraní families into reducciones, mission towns on the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, in today's Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.
  • 25 May 1810: The May Revolution in Buenos Aires — When news reached Buenos Aires that French armies had overrun Andalusia and that the Spanish government had retreated to Cádiz, the city's leading men demanded…
  • c. 1870–1920: Lunfardo: the words of immigrant Buenos Aires — Between 1855 and 1914 Buenos Aires grew from 92,000 to 1.6 million people, and more than two million Italians arrived in Argentina before 1920; in 1895 almost…
  • 17 October 1945–September 1955: Perón, Evita and the birth of Peronism — Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, labour secretary in Argentina's military government, had won the unions with wages, holidays and pensions.
  • 30 April 1977–10 December 1983: The dictatorship and the Madres de Plaza de Mayo — On 24 March 1976 the Argentine armed forces seized power and ran a secret war against anyone they called subversive: people were kidnapped, held in clandestine…
  • October 1982: García Márquez wins the Nobel: the Boom — In the 1960s a handful of Latin American novelists became world famous almost at once: the Argentine Julio Cortázar with Rayuela (1963), the Peruvian Mario…
  • 28 October 2025: Spanish today: almost 635 million speakers — According to the Instituto Cervantes's yearbook El español en el mundo 2025, presented in Madrid on 28 October 2025, almost 635 million people speak Spanish:…

Culture

Culture of Río de la Plata

Food and drink

  • Mate — A bitter infusion passed round a circle from one gourd through one metal straw, with a server, an order and a rule about saying thank you.
  • The asado — The Sunday barbecue that is not a meal but a ceremony: wood or charcoal, never gas; chorizo first; cuts named like wines; coarse salt and nothing else; and applause for the man at the grill.

Festivals and celebrations

  • Día del Amigo — On 20 July the phones in Argentina do not stop, the restaurants of Buenos Aires fill up, and friends give each other a flower or a cake. It started with a dentist watching the Moon landing.

Identity and society

  • Lunfardo — The slang born around 1880 in the conventillos of Buenos Aires, where Italian, Spanish and Polish immigrants lived: a thieves' jargon once, and now the way every porteño talks with friends.
  • Identity and society in Río de la Plata

Music and the arts

  • Tango — Music, dance and poetry from the port neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires and Montevideo: the breathing sound of the bandoneón, an invitation made with a nod, and lyrics in the slang of the tenements.

Literature and storytelling

Places and landscapes

History

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