Argentina historical timeline

Argentina is the second-largest country in South America and is organised around a single city to a degree that shapes every trip through it. Buenos Aires was named the capital in 1816 and has behaved like one ever since: the flights, the long-distance buses and the rail remnants all radiate from it, so two provincial cities are often best connected through the capital rather than to each other. The federal constitution of 1853 is the other durable fact, and it is why provincial rules differ as much as they do.

Chronology

1. 1810 The May Revolution ousts the viceroy, after reports that all of Spain except Cádiz and León had been conquered. It begins the period of nation-building rather than ending colonial rule outright, and the date is the other national holiday alongside independence -- which is why Argentine cities have both a Plaza de Mayo and a 9 de Julio.
2. 1816 The Congress of Tucumán declares independence and names Buenos Aires the capital of the United Provinces. That second decision is the one a traveller feels: the capital's primacy dates from here, and the transport network still assumes it.
3. 1853 The Argentine Constitution is adopted and is, with amendments, still in force today. Buenos Aires did not accept it immediately and seceded from the Confederation, rejoining a few years later -- a tension between capital and provinces that the federal structure preserved and that still governs which rules apply where.
4. 1862 Bartolomé Mitre becomes the first president of the unified country. Unification is what made a single national rail and road network possible, and the shape it took -- everything to Buenos Aires -- is the shape it still has.
5. 1880 Julio Roca is elected president, and the history of modern Argentina is conventionally dated from around this year. The city a visitor walks through is largely this period's work: the boulevards, the opera house, the railway stations and the European facades of Buenos Aires all belong to the decades after 1880.
6. 1908 The present Teatro Colón opens on 25 May with Verdi's Aida, after a twenty-year building process. It is the single clearest surviving statement of what the wealth of the 1880s bought: acoustics that an international survey of opera and orchestra directors rated the best in the world for opera, in a city that had been a colonial port two generations earlier.
7. 1934 Iguazú National Park is created to protect the falls and the subtropical jungle around them. It is the older half of the pair of parks that now anchor Argentine tourism at opposite ends of the country, and both it and its Brazilian counterpart were declared World Heritage Sites in 1984.
8. 1937 Los Glaciares National Park is established on 11 May, and is still the largest national park in the country. Its ice cap is the largest outside Antarctica, Greenland and Iceland, feeding 47 large glaciers -- and it is the reason Patagonian tourism has the shape it does, organised around a protected area rather than a town.
9. 1974 The period of state violence the junta called the Dirty War begins, running to 1983, with an estimated 13,000 to 30,000 people killed or disappeared. The memory sites, the memorial park on the river and the Thursday marches in the Plaza de Mayo are all this, and they are among the most visited places in Buenos Aires.
10. 1982 The Falklands War begins on 2 April and lasts ten weeks. Defeat destroyed what remained of the junta's authority and brought the return to civilian government the following year -- and the war is still present in Argentine public space, in memorials in almost every provincial town.
11. 1983 The dictatorship ends and civilian government returns. Everything a visitor now encounters as Argentine memory culture -- the museums in former detention centres, the marked sites, the annual commemorations -- was built after this date and mostly within the last twenty-five years.
12. 2010 The Teatro Colón reopens on 24 May after being closed for refurbishment from October 2006, work that had begun in 2005. It is the largest heritage restoration the country has undertaken, and the reason the building a visitor tours today is in the condition it is.

What survived, and what did not

Argentina's built heritage is young, concentrated and unusually intact for the Americas. Buenos Aires was rebuilt as a European capital in the decades after 1880, and because the money then drained away rather than arriving again, the result was preserved rather than redeveloped -- which is why the centre reads as a late-nineteenth-century city with twentieth-century economics layered over it. The same logic protects the provincial capitals, where plazas, cathedrals and arcaded streets survive because nothing displaced them.

What did not survive is older and further out. The Jesuit missions of the northeast were abandoned after the order's expulsion and are ruins, now UNESCO-listed on that basis, and the indigenous settlement patterns of the Pampas and Patagonia were deliberately erased in the military campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s. In Patagonia the visible past is consequently very recent -- Welsh chapels, sheep stations, a handful of ports -- and the older record is archaeological, which is part of why the region reads as empty when it is not.