La Plata City Day in Argentina

The city was planned to serve as the capital of the province after the city of Buenos Aires was declared a Federal District in 1880.

La Plata was officially founded by Governor Dardo Rocha on November 19, 1882 and its construction was fully documented in photographs by Tomas Bradley. Between 1952 and 1955, the city was called Ciudad Eva Perón.

The failure of the Buenos Aires uprising of 1880, motivated by the recurrent confrontation between the Province of Buenos Aires and the Nation for the control of the City of Buenos Aires (then capital of both the Provincial and National State), concluded in the federalization of the city, and therefore, the end of the city as capital of the homonymous province.

Among all the cities already existing at that time, Dardo Rocha chose Ensenada, adjacent to the Río de La Plata and connected to Buenos Aires through the Buenos Aires to Ensenada Railroad. On March 14, 1882, he announced the capitalization of this municipality (Ensenada district). However, the decision did not contemplate the installation of the government and administration in the coastal Ensenada, but rather the location of a new city 10 kilometers inland in the Lomas de Ensenada. These lands, populated by mountains, hills and marshes running from southwest to northeast, until draining into the nearby Río de la Plata, through the Arroyo del Gato (now piped), were part of the properties of Martín Iraola, adjacent to the town of Tolosa (founded in 1871, and at that time, inhabited by 7000 people). For the design of the city, he summoned Engineer Pedro Benoit, who drew the plans of the future capital of the province.

Finally, on November 19, 1882, the foundation stone was placed in an urn buried in the geographic center of the city.