Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Spanish Arrive
Although the banks of the Río de la Plata had been populated for tens of thousands of years
by nomadic hunter-gatherers, the first attempt at establishing a permanent settlement was
made by Spanish aristocrat Pedro de Mendoza in 1536. His verbose name for the outpost,
Puerto Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Aire (Port Our Lady Saint Mary of the Good
Wind) was matched only by his extravagant expedition of 16 ships and nearly 1600 men -
almost three times the size of Hernán Cortés' forces that conquered the Aztecs. In spite of
his resources and planning, Mendoza unfortunately arrived too late in the season to plant
adequate crops. The Spanish soon found themselves short on food and in typical colonialist
fashion tried to bully the local Querandí indigenous groups into feeding them. A bitter fight
and four years of struggle ensued, which led to such an acute shortage of supplies that
some of the Spanish resorted to cannibalism. Mendoza himself fled back to Spain, while a
detachment of troops who were left behind retreated upriver to Asunción (now the capital
of Paraguay).
With Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca empire in present-day Peru as the focus of
the Spanish crown, Buenos Aires was largely ignored for the next four decades. In 1580
Juan de Garay returned with an expedition from Asunción and attempted to rebuild Buenos
Aires. The Spanish had not only improved their colonizing skills since Mendoza's ill-fated
endeavor but also had some backup from the cities of Asunción and Santa Fe.
Still, Buenos Aires remained a backwater in comparison to Andean settlements such as
Tucumán, Córdoba, Salta, La Rioja and Jujuy. With the development of mines in the Andes
and the incessant warfare in the Spanish empire swelling the demand for both cattle and
horses, ranching became the core of the city's early economy. Spain maintained harsh re-
strictions on trade out of Buenos Aires and the increasingly frustrated locals turned to
smuggling contraband.
The city continued to flourish and the crown was eventually forced to relax its restric-
tions and co-opt the growing international trade in the region. In 1776 Madrid made
Buenos Aires the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, which included the
world's largest silver mine in Potosí (in present-day Bolivia). For many of its residents, the
new status was recognition that the adolescent city was outgrowing Spain's parental author-
ity.
Although the new viceroyalty had internal squabbles over trade and control issues, when
the British raided the city twice - in 1806 and 1807 - the response was unified. Locals ral-
lied against the invaders without Spanish help and chased them out of town. These two
