History
The north of Argentina was the first part of the present country to be explored by the Spanish colonisation, searching for the routes that would allow them to bring the gold and silver extracted in the Viceroyalty of Peru to the port of Buenos Aires.
Santiago del Estero, in the year 1550, was the first city founded in the territory with such ends, but lost its importance when Tucumán and Salta replaced it as mid-stops to the Atlantic coast when these two cities secured from the aboriginal attacks, and economically strengthened.
The centre of the country was also soon explored and inhabited, being the most important of the first founded cities the city of Córdoba, that became not only a political but also cultural centre with the creation of the first university, the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in 1622.
Most capital cities of the centre-northern Argentina were founded before the year 1600, except for Santa Rosa in La Pampa Province, and Resistencia in Chaco Province.
To the south of the Colorado River, the Patagonia remained under control of the aboriginals. The river itself served as natural frontier.
It was not until the infamous Roca's Conquest of the Desert, started in 1879, when the southern part of Argentina was conquered in what meant the near annihilation of the aboriginal people living in these lands.
The current political division of the provinces of Patagonia was set in 1884 and has not been changed since then, except between 1944 and 1955 when a stripe covering the southern part of Chubut Province and the northern part of Santa Cruz Province was named Comodoro Rivadavia Military Zone.
A law from 1862 provided that Argentine territories outside the frontiers of the provinces would be called national territories. Thus in 1884 the territories of Misiones, Formosa, Chaco, La Pampa, Neuquén, Rió Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego were established. A frontier dispute with Chile in 1900 resulted in an agreement which created the national territory of Los Andes, whose territories were incorporated into Jujuy, Salta and Catamarca in 1943.
La Pampa and Chaco became provinces in 1951. Misiones did so in 1953, and Formosa, Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut and Santa Cruz in 1955. The last national territory, Tierra del Fuego, became a province in 1990.
Due to the late conquest of the south of the country and the prevailing cold weather, most people live in the central or northern provinces. Recent immigration to the south, mainly from Buenos Aires Province and Buenos Aires city, is lessening this difference.
Read more about this topic: Provinces Of Argentina
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I assure you that in our next class we will concern ourselves solely with the history of Egypt, and not with the more lurid and non-curricular subject of living mummies.”
—Griffin Jay, and Reginald LeBorg. Prof. Norman (Frank Reicher)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)