Mar del Plata

Nestled between hills and the ocean, 404 Km. (251 miles) southwest from the city of Buenos Aires, 25 minutes by plane or 5 hours by train or bus is Mar del Plata.

With its beaches, casinos, shopping centers, the best native and international cuisine, parks, natural preservations, Aquarium, museums there is plenty to see and do.

The city is located in a temperate climate zone with maritime influence. The average annual temperature is 14ºC (51.2ºF). The coldest month is July with an average temperature of 8º C (46.4ºF) and the warmest is January with an average of 23º C (73.4ºF) with a nice sea breeze.

Accommodation

 

Mar del Plata Polo Club

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Weekend Financial Times

Pearl of the Atlantic can still dazzle

By Colin Barraclough

Published: December 17 2005 02:00

Barely had I ordered my king crab bisque at Restaurant Timon Plaza when the singer leapt towards me in mid-song. Extending his microphone like a sabre, the swirling chords of a 1980s Argentine pop classic echoing round the room, he mouthed the word I dreaded the most: "Sing!" I did the only thing possible, vaguely mumbling the lyrics I thought he had sung a few seconds before.

"Where are you from?" he asked, belatedly realising I was not Argentine.

"England," I replied.

"The guy's from England," he yelled to the entire restaurant, "and he knows the words to 'Costumbres Argentinas'! Impresionante!" My embarrassment was deep but brief. A six-year-old girl grabbed the mic from me and launched into another Latin pop anthem. Diners abandoned their tables to dance, grandmothers as content as grandchildren to shimmy and sway to the rhythms of Andrés Calamaro and Christian Castro.

I had come to Mar del Plata, Argentina's tacky yet hugely popular resort on the Atlantic coast, to find out how Argentines spend the sultry southern-hemisphere summer. I hadn't planned on being part of their entertainment but mixing with other vacationers, I soon discovered, is central to a typical Argentine beach holiday.

Lying some 400km south of Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata was once known as the "pearl of the Atlantic". In the 1870s, upper-class families from the capital began to build elegant summer houses on the waterfront, fencing off exclusive balnearios, or private bathing areas, and landscaping gardens that led directly on to beaches of startlingly golden sand.

By the 1950s, mass tourism had diluted some of the city's elegance.

Today, the central square, Plaza Colón, is fronted by a casino. To each  side stretch several kilometres of funfairs, circus tents, go-karting  tracks and amusement arcades. So many high-rise hotels and apartment buildings have arisen along the waterfront that several beaches are left in shade for much of the day.

Yet Mar del Plata continues to exercise a talismanic hold on the nation's idea of summer. Each year, Argentines descend in their millions to the beaches, eager to exchange stifling apartments for fresh breezes and open seascapes.

Windsurfing and jetskiing are popular. Quad-biking draws the energetic to the dunes north-east of the city while, to the south-west, paragliders exploit the thermals that rake up off the steep cliffs at Chapadmalal. A bustling port, home to a large fishing fleet, is populated by a pod of sea lions that appear to thrive on human attention.

On my first day, I found an empty stretch of sand on Playa Las Toscas, a municipal beach, and struck up conversation with several families around me. Each came from a different, distant province but most spent each summer in Mar del Plata, some returning every year to the same spot on the same beach.

"Rented apartments and timeshares often come with their own umbrella at a balneario," explained Julieta Pierresteguy, a student from Buenos Aires province. "We've become good friends with the people we see each year under the neighbouring umbrella."

Three generations of Julieta's family welcomed me, in rapid succession offering me food, a hand at volleyball, and a sip at the ubiquitous mate, a strong green tea drunk through a metal straw from a seasoned squash gourd. The drink is Argentina's national obsession. Every half hour, a family member dashed towards a stall advertising hot water to refill the Thermos flask for yet another round of the bitter-tasting brew.

The key to visiting Argentina is conversation, for the country's riches are invested in its complex and amusing inhabitants. In the afternoon, I strolled along a jetty beneath the Torreón del Monje headland, widely used by anglers casting for drumfish, dogfish and mackerel.

"I prefer to fish from the shore than from a boat," one angler, Ernesto Barón, told me. "The fish come here to look for crabs so there are always rich pickings. Obviously, there's a money issue as well - I don't have any."

That night, I sipped a Cologne Kölsch beer at the Antares Brew Pub, a micro-brewery, and fell into conversation with Liliana Runa, one of the 40,000 or so psychotherapists who practise in Buenos Aires. She tried to explain why therapy is in such demand among Argentines. "We're not sure if we're European or South American," she said. "We're descended from Europeans. We have our faces turned towards Europe and our backs to this country. We're a nation in internal conflict. We're still trying to figure out who we are.

"It's little wonder that Mar del Plata's cafés, salons and all-you-can-eat parrilla grills, where you can feast on a dizzying array of palate-teasing beef cuts, are buzzing with chatter until the small hours.

The following day, I headed to the port, marooned beyond a decaying industrial zone of rusted fuel tanks and disused warehouses. Its cobblestoned wharves were bustling as fishermen loaded nets aboard orange-and-red fishing smacks. A row of stalls offered fresh seafood. I perched on the dock, legs dangling, and a large shadow passed beneath me. A second later, a sea lion breached just a metre away, snuffling and blowing into the water.

Like its sister resorts further up the Atlantic coast, Mar del Plata has avoided much of the financial and political turmoil to have troubled Argentina in recent years. "We don't have much problem with crime here," a taxi driver, Raul Aguinaga, told me. "People are still pretty trusting and it's safe to walk around at night."Just as well, for Argentines love the night. Dinner rarely begins before 10pm and it's common to see entire families, often with very young children, still going strong at two or three in the morning. People stroll the streets far into the night, while most dance clubs don't even bother to open their doors until 3am.

It was a struggle to wake early on my last morning but I was keen to try my hand at sea fishing. Eyes squinting in the daylight, I found my way to the quay at the Club Motonáutica where Leo Rodríguez was preparing his sport fishing boat, the Valencia.Leo had grown up around Mar del Plata and knew the waters well. We steered a course for a sandbank three kilometres offshore and soon attracted the attention of a southern giant petrel, which soared effortlessly above us, watching our every move.

The petrel was in for a treat, for Mar del Plata's waters are astonishingly rich. I had barely held a rod before yet almost every cast resulted in a strike. We landed some 60 fish in a single day, including several species that exist only in southern waters, such as pejerrey (silverside), anchoa de banco (bluefish) and brótola (red cod).

We turned back in late afternoon, Mar del Plata and its sandy seafront laid out before us. I picked out the stone villas that first gave the city such grace, their cliff-top gardens coloured by flowering bougainvillea and jacaranda. Lit by the sun's setting rays, even the modern high-rises seemed infused with beauty.

Mar del Plata has certainly suffered from its own popularity. At that moment, though, glimpsed over the sparkling water, it appeared once more to be a dazzling pearl on the Atlantic shoreline.