Who ruled Buenos Aires?

Buenos Aires lies on the south-western shore of the Río de la Plata, the broad, muddy estuary formed by the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, at the edge of the flat grasslands of the Pampas. Spain wanted a port here to guard the river route into the interior of South America, but for two centuries the town was a neglected outpost. Its rise came late and fast: it led the revolution against Spain in 1810, and between about 1880 and 1930 European immigration turned it into one of the largest and richest cities in the southern hemisphere.

The shores of the estuary were home to hunter-gatherers, including the Querandí, who moved across the grasslands. In 1536 the Spanish captain Pedro de Mendoza founded a settlement named after Our Lady of Buen Ayre, the "good air" honoured by Mediterranean sailors. Hunger and attacks by the Querandí forced the survivors to abandon it in 1541 and withdraw upriver to Asunción. In 1580 Juan de Garay sailed down the Paraná from Asunción and founded the town again, this time for good.

Under the rules of the Spanish Empire, legal trade had to pass through Lima and Panama, so goods reached Buenos Aires slowly and at great cost. The town lived largely on smuggling, exchanging hides and silver from the Andean mines for European manufactures and enslaved Africans, who made up a large part of its population by the late 18th century. In 1776 the Spanish crown recognised its growing importance by making it the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata and opening its port to more trade.

British forces seized the city in 1806 and attacked again in 1807, and both times local militias, not Spanish troops, drove them out. The experience gave the creole elite confidence. In May 1810, after news arrived that French armies had overrun almost all of Spain, an open town council deposed the viceroy, and on 25 May a local junta took power, the start of the Spanish American wars of independence in the south. Independence was formally declared at Tucumán in 1816. For decades afterwards the port city, which controlled customs revenue, fought the interior provinces over how the country should be governed. Juan Manuel de Rosas ruled from Buenos Aires for most of the period between 1829 and 1852, and only in 1880 was the city separated from its province and made the federal capital of Argentina.

A yellow fever epidemic in 1871 killed some 14,000 people and pushed wealthy families to move north from the old southern districts. Then came the boom. Railways carried grain and beef from the Pampas to the port, and millions of migrants, mostly Italians and Spaniards, arrived. By 1914 roughly half the city's people had been born abroad. The Avenida de Mayo, the Teatro Colón and, in 1913, the first underground railway in Latin America were built, and the tango took shape in the city's working-class districts.

The Plaza de Mayo became the stage of national politics. Huge crowds gathered there on 17 October 1945 to demand the release of Juan Perón, and navy aircraft bombed it in June 1955, shortly before he was overthrown. During the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, mothers of the disappeared began marching in the square every week. Since 1996 the city has elected its own head of government. About three million people live in the city proper and some 16 million in Greater Buenos Aires, more than a third of Argentina's population.