Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Aires that grew vibrant, booming, and open to economic and social
opportunity—though tempered by colonial-style discrimination.
The growing export trade in cattle hides, wool, salted meat, and
tallow provided the catalyst for rural expansion. Population increase
on the Pampas even outstripped growth of the city of Buenos Aires.
While the number of urban residents yearly increased by 1.5 percent
between 1820 and 1860, the population growth rate in the countryside
reached 3.4 percent per annum. In 1822, Buenos Aires had more than
55,000 inhabitants and the rest of the province 63,000; in 1855, the city
had grown to 90,000, and the countryside, to nearly 184,000 people.
Nothing characterized this growth and diversification more than did
the expanding range cattle business.
Prospective cattlemen initially acquired their land on the Pampas
from the government of Buenos Aires province. As in colonial days,
a simple declaration of vacant land
(tierras baldías)
sufficed for an
individual to register a claim with authorities. In the 1820s, reform
politicians led by Bernardino Rivadavia established a program known
as emphyteusis, in which the state rented out frontier land rather than
giving it to private owners. Under emphyteusis, the government allot-
ted land in huge tracts, some as large as 30, 60, and 100 square leagues
(a league equaled 3.54 miles), to individuals. The average grant varied
between 5 and 10 leagues, and foreigners as well as native-born resi-
dents received grants. The collection of rents, however, proved nearly
impossible, so when Juan Manuel de Rosas became governor, he sold
the lands to the tenants, as well as political friends, on easy terms.
Some paid in cattle and horses. Governor Rosas also made new land
grants to soldiers participating in frontier wars against the Indians.
With little capital to stock the land, the soldiers sold their small
grants to speculators. The sheer abundance of virgin prairie, whose
availability only the Indians contested, encouraged the granting of the
original tracts in large chunks. At mid-century, frontier
estancias
far
to the south of Buenos Aires measured from 22,000 acres to 74,000
acres.
From the beginning, the commercial growth gave rise to a vigor-
ous market in private land sales. The value of land in the province
rose according to the worth of its products. Land worth 15 centavos
per hectare in 1800 sold for three gold pesos in 1837 and fetched 30
gold pesos by mid-century. (The gold peso was a notional measure of
value and, in fact, did not exist in physical form. Most money actually
changed hands in the form of inflated paper pesos, but because the
value of the paper money fluctuated rapidly, usually declining, many
