Buenos Aires – La Plata

The city of BA is a very pleasant and bustling city with much Neoclassical Eurpean style architecture. I do not know what reasons exactly might justify its inscription though. I would like to point out the Hispano-American Museum which exhibits colonial art in a beautiful colonial mansion as a worthwhile visit. La Boca, on the other hand, became so heavily commercialized it is almost unworthy of a visit.

The City of La Plata was designed as a new city in 1882, to serve as the capital of Buenos Aires Province after Buenos Aires itself had become the national capital. So it's a city that was designed at a drawing board according to a rigorous plan. I visited it on a day trip from Buenos Aires. It's a ride of about one hour, and buses leave every 5 or 10 minutes. My planning wasn't too great, as it turned out to be Columbus Day (a national holiday). When I walked from the bus station to the central area, the only creatures I came across were dogs and the city's lowlife.

Finding your way is easy in this planned city: the streets have no names, only numbers. There's a large city map at the bus station, where you can see that the city is a perfect square with 40 horizontal and vertical blocks. They are crossed by some diagonals, for the creative touch. The planners were environmentally conscious avant-la-lettre and had envisaged 'urban forestry', parks and gardens. I visited one of those, the Paseo del Bosque. There's a zoo and the large Natural History Museum where I met my Glyptodon friends again (see Colonia de Sacramento review).

With the city's Casa Curutchet, one of Le Corbusier's buildings, right on track to become a WHS in 2009, the remaining chances for the city as a whole are slim. Also, I don't think any (relatively) modern planned city can surpass the extremities …