Argentina

Argentina: capital Buenos Aires, population 45.9M, area 2,780,400 km². The 35th most populous country, in Americas. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

Argentina runs from subtropical falls on the Brazilian border to glaciers in Patagonia, with Aconcagua, the highest summit in the Americas, on its western edge. Rock painters stencilled hands in Santa Cruz thousands of years before Buenos Aires was founded twice, in 1536 and 1580, and immigration made nearly half the capital foreign-born by 1914. Tango, mate, fileteado signwriting and five-hour asados all come from that mixture of port city and open country.

• Pedro de Mendoza founded Buenos Aires on 2 February 1536 but the settlement did not hold; Juan de Garay sailed down the Paraná from Asunción and founded the city again on 11 June 1580.
• Thirty-three deputies meeting at Tucumán declared independence on 9 July 1816, and the text was written in Spanish and then translated into Quechua and Aymara for circulation.
• The Sáenz Peña Law of February 1912 made the male vote universal, secret and compulsory by creating a national electoral roll; women were not included until 1947.
• Immigration changed the country so quickly that by 1914 foreign-born residents made up 49 per cent of the population of Buenos Aires and about 30 per cent nationwide.

• Jorge Luis Borges became director of the National Public Library in 1955 and was completely blind by the age of 55; in 1961 he shared the first International Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett.
• Bernardo Houssay shared the 1947 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for showing how pituitary hormones regulate blood glucose, and was the first Latin American laureate in the sciences.
• René Favaloro began using the great saphenous vein to bypass blocked coronary arteries at the Cleveland Clinic in early 1967; standardising that operation became the work of his career.
• Astor Piazzolla got his first bandoneon after his father spotted one in a New York pawn shop in 1929, and the counterpoint he studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris shaped nuevo tango.

• The Iguazú Falls break along a 2.7-kilometre edge into anything from 150 to 300 separate cataracts, between 60 and 82 metres high, depending on the level of the river.
• The Perito Moreno glacier ends in a five-kilometre front that periodically dams an arm of Lake Argentino until the trapped water bursts the ice bridge, a cycle recorded repeatedly since 1917.
• Painters at Cueva de las Manos sprayed pigment through hollow bone pipes to stencil hundreds of hands onto the rock, working in waves between about 7300 BC and AD 700.
• Aconcagua rises to 6,967 metres in Mendoza Province, the highest summit in the Americas and the highest mountain anywhere outside Asia.

• Tango took shape in the 1880s in the port districts of the Río de la Plata out of milonga, habanera and candombe; UNESCO listed it for Argentina and Uruguay together in 2009.
• Mate is drunk through a bombilla, a metal straw that also works as a sieve, from a gourd whose name comes from mati, the Quechua word for the calabash.
• An asador burns quebracho or algarrobo charcoal rather than pine or eucalyptus, whose resins would carry into the meat, and holds an asado over low heat for about 5 hours.
• Fileteado lettering began on horse-drawn delivery carts in the late 19th century and moved onto shop signs and the buses of Buenos Aires, its scrollwork wrapped around proverbs and jokes.

What is the capital of Argentina?

The capital of Argentina is Buenos Aires.

What is the population of Argentina?

Argentina has about 45.9M people — the 35th most populous country in the world.

How big is Argentina?

Argentina covers 2,780,400 km², making it the 8th largest country by area.

Which region is Argentina in?

Argentina is in South America, Americas.