The pampas are the flat, absurdly fertile grassland that made Argentina rich, and Buenos Aires Province covers the heart of them. It is the size of Italy, almost entirely level, and given over to cattle and soya — which sounds unpromising and produces the two things the country is best known for after tango: beef, and the gaucho who raised it.
San Antonio de Areco, two hours from the capital, is where that tradition is kept without being embalmed — silversmiths, working estancias, and the country's best-known gaucho festival in November. It is the standard day out from Buenos Aires and earns it.
The Atlantic coast is where the whole country goes in January. Mar del Plata is the capital of that, a city of a million in summer and a third of that the rest of the year. Tandil inland breaks the flatness with genuine hills and has built a reputation on cured meats and cheese, and Bahía Blanca at the southern edge is where the pampas end and Patagonia starts.
La Plata, the provincial capital, was built from nothing in 1882 on a strict grid with diagonals cut across it, and is worth an afternoon for the sheer nineteenth-century confidence of the thing.
