Argentine culture: a horseman from the plain and a music from the port

How the gaucho became the national figure

The gaucho was a ranch hand of the Pampas, usually mestizo, who rode the open range of the great estancias in pursuit of wild horses and half-wild criollo cattle in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Britannica's account he was scorned in his own time as a drinker and a vagabond. The estancias that hired him were central institutions of the country's economy and politics as well as its culture, huge grants of land made to Creole families in the 17th century and worked from scattered adobe ranchos, with the pulpería, a country inn where trading and drinking went on, at the centre of each district.

The open range disappeared late in the 19th century, once barbed wire, alfalfa and English breeds of cattle had reached the Pampas. That is when the gaucho became literature. José Hernández published El gaucho Martín Fierro in 1872, the national epic poem, and Ricardo Güiraldes's novel Don Segundo Sombra followed in 1926. Both made him a figure of self-reliance and courage. The divide between Martín Fierro and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo is the standard example of the ideological quarrel that runs through Argentine letters.

Britannica puts the tension plainly. Most Argentines are urban and look to the porteños, the people of Buenos Aires, as arbiters of taste, yet the interior gave all of them their symbol of national identity. Something of the gaucho's world survives in pato, a game perhaps dating to the 17th century in which two teams of four riders fight for a leather ball with handles and throw it through a hoop on a post.

Where tango came from

Tango was born in the 1880s along the Río de la Plata, in the poor port districts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, from a mix of the Argentine milonga, the Spanish and Cuban habanera and the Uruguayan candombe. It was played in the bars and brothels of the ports, where owners hired bands to entertain their customers. UNESCO, which inscribed tango on its Representative List of intangible heritage in 2009 as a joint Argentine and Uruguayan tradition, describes it as the creation of the urban lower classes of the two cities, among whom European immigrants, the descendants of African slaves and native-born criollos merged their customs into a distinctive identity.

In the first years of the 20th century dancers and orchestras from Buenos Aires took it to Europe, and the first European craze broke out in Paris before spreading to London and Berlin. Singers such as Carlos Gardel turned it into an elegant ballroom form of romantic and melancholy songs; Gardel died in an air crash at Medellín in 1935. Later Astor Piazzolla, a composer and virtuoso of the bandoneón, the so-called tango accordion, pushed the music towards new forms.

By the end of the 20th century, Britannica notes, tango had lost much of its hold on the young, who preferred rock and pop, while keeping its audience among older Argentines and foreign visitors. Rock nacional, Argentine rock, became the music of the young, and León Gieco's folk-rock bridged it with the folk music of the interior.

Why Buenos Aires Spanish sounds Italian

Spanish is the language of the state and of almost everyone. The variety spoken around Buenos Aires and across the Río de la Plata, Rioplatense Spanish, carries the mark of the immigration. It uses vos in place of tú, with its own verb forms, in speech and in writing alike, the voseo that sets it apart from most other Spanish. It absorbed Italian loanwords into the slang called lunfardo. Its intonation resembles Italian dialects, and a study by the National Scientific and Technical Research Council found that people in Buenos Aires and Rosario speak with an intonation closest to Neapolitan.

The immigrants who shaped it came in waves: from 1870 to 1890 mainly speakers of northern Italian dialects, Spanish, Basque and Galician, with smaller numbers from France and Germany. Between 1861 and 1920 about 1.5 million Spaniards and 3.8 million Italians settled in the country.

Other languages hold on in particular places.

What Argentines believe and how they observe it

About four fifths of Argentines are at least nominally Roman Catholic, most of them non-practising, according to Britannica, and the Church's influence is strong in government and society. The constitution commits the federal government to support the Catholic faith without making it an official religion. Protestants make up about 5% of the population, and Muslims and Jews are small minorities.

The relationship has been uneasy for a long time. The secular education law of 1884 led the Holy See to break off relations for several years, Perón's attempt to curb the Church's political influence in the 1950s helped turn the officers against him, and in July 2010 Congress legalised same-sex marriage over mass demonstrations organised by the Church. In March 2013 the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was elected pope as Francis. Public education is secular, and religious minorities worship freely.

What Argentina eats and drinks

The meal that stands for the country is the asado, beef ribs, steak, chorizo, sweetbreads and morcilla grilled together and served with chimichurri, a sauce of herbs, garlic and vinegar. Whole lambs and goats are traditionally cooked over an open fire, the asado a la estaca. Sunday lunch with the family is the meal of the week, and its centre is usually asado or pasta. Ice cream follows a recipe very close to Italian gelato.

The Indigenous and criollo layer is older. Empanadas, pastries of meat, cheese or sweetcorn, are ordered by the dozen with the fold of the crimp, the repulgue, telling the fillings apart; the dish descends from a 15th-century Spanish travelling bread. Locro, a stew of maize, beans, meat and squash, and humita are criollo dishes of the same kind. For sweetness there is dulce de leche, a milk caramel spread on toast and used in cakes and alfajores, shortbread biscuits sandwiched with it. A sweet-potato paste served with cheese goes by the name of Martín Fierro's sweet, after the hero of the poem.

Above all there is mate. A gourd is filled about three quarters full with yerba mate, the dried leaves and twigs of Ilex paraguariensis, and the rather bitter drink is sipped through a metal or cane straw, the bombilla. In small gatherings one gourd is passed from person to person and refilled by whoever holds the kettle. The yerba comes from Misiones, where it is the main crop.

What the heritage lists record

Argentina's cultural World Heritage sites map a history older than the port. The Cueva de las Manos on the Río Pinturas in Patagonia was inscribed in 1999. The Quebrada de Humahuaca (2003) in Jujuy is the valley the Inca Empire conquered in the late 15th century, and the Qhapaq Ñan, the Andean road system Argentina shares with its neighbours, followed in 2014.

The colonial layer is religious. In the early 17th century the Spanish crown turned to the Jesuits to pacify the Guaraní of Mesopotamia, and within a century the order had built so many mission settlements, the reducciones, that the region took the name Misiones. Four of their ruins, San Ignacio Miní among them, were inscribed in 1983 and 1984 together with São Miguel in Brazil, and the Jesuit Block and Estancias of Córdoba followed in 2000. Córdoba's university dates from 1613.

The most recent inscription is of a different kind. In 2023 UNESCO listed the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, in Buenos Aires, a former clandestine centre of detention and torture where prisoners of the dictatorship were killed. Remembrance is part of public culture: the anniversary of the 1976 coup is a public holiday, and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo began their weekly Thursday vigils in the square in the late 1970s.

The Europe of the immigrants shows in the cities. Buenos Aires churches such as San Ignacio, El Pilar and the cathedral, with the old Cabildo, show the plain Rioplatense baroque of Italian architects; after independence Italian and French influence grew, and Beaux-Arts and Art Nouveau buildings filled Argentine cities in the early 20th century. Painters trained in Italy and France brought back academic, Impressionist and Cubist styles, and later artists looked to the Mexican muralists and to abstract and pop art from the United States. Antonio Berni painted life in the villas miseria, the shanty towns, in the 1950s and 1960s.

How Argentine writers argued about the country

Argentine literature has been an argument about the nation from its beginning, and Facundo against Martín Fierro is only its first round. Jorge Luis Borges made the back streets of Buenos Aires and the empty Pampas into settings for metaphysical stories, Ficciones and The Aleph among them, and his influence spread to writers everywhere. Julio Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Roberto Arlt and Leopoldo Lugones are among the other writers the country's literature is read through.

The press grew up with the literature. La Prensa was founded in 1869 and La Nación in 1870, and the National Library, founded in 1810, holds more than two million volumes. Buenos Aires is a publishing centre for South America, and foreign-language papers are common in the capital. Composers of the early 20th century, Alberto Williams and Carlos López Buchardo among them, set folk and gaucho themes in classical forms, and Alberto Ginastera took up the currents of European and American music a generation later.

Film reached the same subjects later. Argentine cinema dates from the 1930s, although Quirino Cristiani had already made animated feature films in Buenos Aires in 1917 and 1918. La historia oficial (1985), about the adoption of children born to prisoners murdered during the dictatorship, won the Academy Award for foreign-language film, and the industry has revived since the 1990s.

What Argentines play and watch

Football came with the British in the 19th century, as polo did. The national team has won the World Cup three times, in 1978, 1986 and 2022, and players such as Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi are national figures; Messi received the Ballon d'Or eight times between 2009 and 2023. Polo draws on the gaucho tradition and the horses and open fields of the Pampas, and a ranch hand with talent can make a name at polo or in horse racing. Sport also follows class lines. The wealthy and the urban middle classes belong to private sporting clubs for tennis and sailing, and rugby is played in several private schools, while football is, in Britannica's words, extremely popular across the country, and a majority of Argentines follow televised sport.

Summer means the beaches of Mar del Plata, and winter the ski slopes around San Carlos de Bariloche in the Lake District, where there is also hiking and fishing. Television serials, the telenovelas, are produced locally and exported across the region.