History of Mar del Plata

The first European navigator to visit the beaches and cliffs of what one day would become Mar del Plata was Sir Francis Drake in his 1577 circumnavigation voyage. He introduced the name Cape Lobos in the cartography of his time, due to the large colony of sea lions (lobos de mar in Spanish) around the cape today known as Cabo Corrientes. Just four years later, the Spanish Governor of the River Plate, Don Juan de Garay (second founder of Buenos Aires) explored the area by land, and paid tribute to the beautiful landscape by describing it as a muy galana costa (a very elegant shore). This is today one of the city's favourite mottos.

In 1742, during the War of Jenkin's Ear, eight survivors of the HMS Wager, part of Admiral Anson expedition, lived through a ten-months ordeal before being decimated and captured by the nomadic tribe of the Tehuelches, who eventually handed them to the Spaniards.

In 1746, by order of the Spanish Kingdom, a Jesuit Order's mission was established om the norwestern shore of what is now Laguna de los Padres, some eight miles (13 km) west of the modern city, but it was abandoned after a series of northern Tehuelches attacks, led by native chieftain Cangapol. On 15 November 1770 a punitive expedition departing from Luján and led by captain Juan Antonio Hernández, with the help of friendly natives, defeated a group of Tehuelches who had been harassing and plundering a number of farms and hamlets beyond the Salado river. The battle took place at the Vulcan heights, near Sierra de los Padres, where 102 Tehuelches were ambushed and killed. In 1772 another Spanish expedition commanded by captain Pedro Pablo Pabón surveyed the area. The region was not populated again by Europeans until 1856, when a meat-salting facility was built by Portuguese entrepreneur Coelho de Meirelles, and a stable population settled there.

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