🌎 From Mar del Plata, Province of Buenos Aires
On the night of Thursday, March 16, while Buenos Aires burned in the dramatic blackout of its last heat wave, the beaches of La Perla lit up with waves of phosphorescent blue. The show was intense and fleeting: it lasted an hour, maybe less. And only those who, by chance, were walking on the waterfront of Peralta Ramos Avenue or Paseo Dávila saw it. In Mar del Plata the summer ended in a much kinder way than in the AMBA.
The spa town was still inhabited by a significant tourist flurry. And the news, then, escalated quickly through photos and videos. It was the microvirality of a chaotic day: the illuminated waters of Mar del Plata in front of the images of the central city in the dark. Unimaginable postcard of an impossible summer.
The phenomenon was generated by noctilucas, a species of unicellular microalgae that causes flashes of light under certain conditions; and that he had also left some foam on the shore two summers, another beautiful visual spectacle that made rapacious news. In both cases, without any drama: different authorities explained that the event did not pose a danger of toxicity either for the waters or for its bathers. They were simply visual poems of the Mardel Sea, our only metropolis-legend on the Atlantic Coast..
► Saltwater Monster
Mar del Plata is a monster with salt water. A mega-urbanization that contains beaches, hotels, ports, neighborhoods and peripheries. From the Aquarium to the Batán jail. and a highway the beloved Route 2, which carries, brings and connects with the AMBA. Sand and cement until the last moment of a city that has been receiving tourists for more than a hundred years.
Mar del Plata has an interesting tension. On one hand, it is the self-proclaimed Happy City, memory of the golden era in which summer combined day with night. But, on the other, she refers to the beach that it metaphorizes precisely what we want to avoid from it: piling up in the sand. The name -it’s curious- gave a complete twist in the popular imagination: it began as that of a gigantic and charming hotel from the first half of the 20th century, to end up as the most popular spa in the center, where the sea spins in front of the pavement.
The era of mass tourism in MDQ was ordered around a lighthouse. That it was not the one in Punta Mogotes, to the south, but the mass that make up the Provincial Hotel and the Casino with its tiled ramlones. behind her back, Bristol and the sea, definitive postcard of popular tourism in Argentina. And, in front, the historic central nucleus with the pedestrian San Martin as axis vector. From then on, all history was born, built or died there.
► The long axis
The man from Mar del Plata, of course, will have a different look at the travel chronicle, completely traversed by his daily subjectivities. We are talking about most inhabited urban conglomerate in Argentina after the AMBA-Rosario-Córdoba podium: almost 600,000 people walk daily in a city that goes beyond recreational leisure.
For the traveler, on the other hand, the map is the one drawn by his own GPS. Places that are deliberately searched for, others that appear on the fly and the invariable share of unpredictability. order and adventure They are building the journey between the way you want and the way it takes place.
Thus, nearby beaches may appear but not so bursting, such as Grande and Chica. Otherwise, the after in Mogotes. Or beyond the 11 bordering the sea on the way to Chapadmalal. The offer of bars and nightclubs is distributed more or less on the same axis (center – south before the port – after the lighthouse), although it adds what remains of Alem street and those who migrated from there to the corridor on the beach before Escollera Norte, plus the node of recitals between Juan B. Justo and Constitución.
► The paths of faith
Everything today seems to breathe into the afterlife a center that remained as a testimonial record. The layout even seems to leave us with a metaphor: it goes from the Basilica to the Casino, two ways of understanding faith. On the way we pass the San Martín pedestrian street as a museum that takes us from its aspirational blocks with legendary sweet shops to the noiseless closure from the Pedestrian Mallauthentic colossus in front of Avellaneda street in Buenos Aires, not only offer, price and quality, but also the possibility of trying the pilcha (take note).
And finally, of course. the monumental Rambla Casino, such his name. That mastodon crowned with the two twin buildings and a tile and cement surround that was building its own ecosystem, almost marginalbetween fairs, street vendors, police, pungas, gamblers, pawnshops, fritters on the go and sale of boat trips along the coast.
The center emanates disorderly lights and noises. The theaters of those times, forgotten showrooms and souvenirs for trinkets like sea lions that change color depending on the weather (and we have many of them). And the boulevard with all its disorder, a kind of Plaza Constitución with a view of the sea and the definitive postcard of the city: the two stone sea lions before stepping on the sand.
► A port and a cemetery
Perhaps it is true that there are as many Mar del Plata as there are people imagining it. But there is a place that involves everyone like no other: the port. From the sea lions for the photo to the thousands that hang out in the boats and docks. From the shoulder to snack on a fried food to the shipyard where the boats are repaired. Local and visitor in a place where the sea shakes aggressively and makes itself heard even with its nose: it is from there that the smell of fish that many of us like and others dislike is blown.
The port is a very powerful meeting point, although at the same time a limit: it marks the here and there like no other landmark in Mar del Plata. Until there, the conventional Mar del Plata rocks with its different waterfronts. Then the port neighborhood appears as a transition and then the beaches towards Mogotes and Chapadmalal.
Mar del Plata was built on a cemetery of its own: dozens of emblematic places no longer exist. Many were in the port area, such as the Manzana de los Circos, the Superdomo or the unusual Aldosivi court inside a quarry, to name a few. The one who still survives is the Jesus who is not Jesus to whom everyone goes to pray at the end of the South Breakwater. Tourists, believing that he is a Christ the Redeemer with open arms like the one in Rio. And the locals, especially those who work at the sea, who know it best: It is truly San Salvador, patron saint of fishermen.
