The Unique History of La Plata

Argentina is home to some fairly large cities, and most with several hundred years of history behind them. These include the extremely sophisticated Buenos Aires as well as the college city of Cordoba. The third largest city in the country of Argentina is La Plata. While it is now over two hundred years old, the entire city was created using modern concepts in design, urban planning, and was even photographed throughout its construction.

The governor of the region, Dardo Rocha, decided to create a new city meant to serve the needs of provincial government institutions and a new university. Pedro Benoit was then hired to design the new city. He did so by developing it around an urban center – La Plata has a city center with two main, intersecting avenues that run along a diagonal. All other streets are built along a grid of six blocks by six block patterns which meet at small parks.

Rocha effectively created the design using standards of the day, and to take it even further opened up the architectural design of the main city buildings to an international competition. This is the reason today that the city has such a cosmopolitan appeal – its city hall was won by the German designers, who had their own European influences, and the Governor’s Palace was created by an Italian firm with concepts of their own.

La Plata is the home to some other unique “firsts”. In addition to being the first city on the South American continent designed by urban planners, it was the first city to install electricity throughout the entire town – as early as 1884 the streets of La Plata were lit by electric lighting.

It is also home to the largest church in the country – the Cathedral of La Plata. The city also contains one of the only two buildings designed by Le Corbusier (a Swiss architect known for his contributions to Modern Architecture) in the Americas – the Curutchet House was fully restored in the 1980s and is a national landmark of Argentina.

Clearly, any visitor to La Plata has a great deal to see and do. The many parks are lined with Linden trees, the streets are full of interesting shops and restaurants, and the University is known for its remarkable observatory and paleontology museums.

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