Argentina

Argentina is a big country in South America.

It is long from top to bottom. Tall mountains stand on one side. The ocean is on the other side. The capital city is Buenos Aires.

Argentina is a country in South America. It covers most of the southern part of the continent and is the eighth-largest country in the world. On a map it looks like a triangle turned upside down, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom.

The Andes mountains form most of its border with Chile in the west, and the Atlantic Ocean lies to the east. Its name comes from argentum, the Latin word for silver. About 46.5 million people lived in Argentina in 2026, and Spanish is the national language. The capital is Buenos Aires.

Argentina occupies most of the southern cone of South America. Britannica ranks it the world's eighth-largest country and describes it as an inverted triangle, about 1,420 km across at its widest and 3,800 km long, with an Atlantic coastline of some 4,700 km. Wikidata gives an area of about 2.78 million square kilometers.

The land is grouped into four regions: the Andes in the west; the North, made up of the dry Gran Chaco lowlands and Mesopotamia between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers; the Pampas grasslands in the center; and Patagonia, a cold, dry, windy region running about 1,900 km south from the Colorado River to Tierra del Fuego. INDEC, the national statistics office, estimates the population at 46,466,688 on July 1, 2026, from its projections based on the 2022 census, and Britannica notes that more than nine-tenths of people live in urban areas. The country's name comes from the Latin argentum, silver.

Buenos Aires is the biggest city in Argentina.

It is close to a very wide river. Córdoba is an old city with an old university. Far in the south is Ushuaia. It is a city near the bottom of the world.

Buenos Aires, the capital, lies on the northern edge of the Pampas, in the basin of the Río de la Plata, a huge estuary where two big rivers meet. About one in three people in Argentina live in greater Buenos Aires. Millions of people from Italy, Spain and other countries settled there in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Córdoba, founded in 1573, has Argentina's oldest university, started in 1613. In the far northwest, the Quebrada de Humahuaca is a long, dry mountain valley that people have used as a trade route for 10,000 years. And Ushuaia, on the island of Tierra del Fuego, is the southernmost city in the world.

Buenos Aires grew from a small town into one of the world's most populous and cosmopolitan cities after the mid-1800s, when railroads, meat-packing plants and European immigration transformed the Pampas. In 1880 the city was made a federal territory and the national capital, and La Plata became the new capital of Buenos Aires province. Today greater Buenos Aires holds about a third of the population; other major cities include Rosario, Córdoba, San Miguel de Tucumán and Mar del Plata.

Córdoba, founded in 1573, led the region in the 17th and 18th centuries; its university, founded in 1613, is the oldest in the country. UNESCO inscribed the Quebrada de Humahuaca in 2003: a 155-km valley in Jujuy province, part of the Camino Inca route, with 10,000 years of evidence of use as a trade route and stone-walled terrace fields at Coctaca, thought to date from about 1,500 years ago and still in use. Britannica calls Ushuaia, which began as a missionary settlement, the southernmost city in the world.

Argentina has very tall mountains called the Andes.

Aconcagua is the tallest one. In the middle are flat, grassy plains. In the south, giant rivers of ice slide down to a lake. In the north, a river falls over many cliffs.

The Andes run along Argentina's western edge for about 3,700 kilometers. Aconcagua, about 6,960 meters high, is the tallest mountain in South America. East of the mountains lie the Pampas, flat grasslands with rich, dark soil. The word pampa means "flat plain" in Quechua.

Air loses its moisture as it crosses the high Andes, so much of the land on their eastern side is dry. This is called a rain shadow. In the south, Los Glaciares National Park is about half covered by glaciers. In the north, the Iguazú River drops about 80 meters over waterfalls almost 3 kilometers wide.

The Andean ranges of the Northwest rise to between about 4,900 and 6,700 m, broken by high plateaus called punas. Aconcagua is South America's highest mountain; its official height, announced in 2012 by Argentina's National Geographic Institute (IGN) after GPS and gravity surveys, is 6,960.8 m (older references give 6,959 m). The Pampas are built of thick loess deposits; the Humid Pampa receives 990 mm of rain a year in the east and 500 mm near the Andes.

Argentina lies almost entirely in the temperate zone of the Southern Hemisphere. A rain shadow on the eastern side of the Andes, where air masses lose their moisture crossing the mountains, makes Argentina the only place in the Southern Hemisphere with a long stretch of arid eastern coastline. In Los Glaciares National Park (UNESCO, 1981), glaciers fed by the South Patagonian Ice Field cover roughly half of the 600,000-hectare property; the front of the Perito Moreno Glacier, up to 60 m high, calves icebergs into Lake Argentino. At Iguazú (UNESCO, 1984), the river falls about 80 m across a width of almost three kilometers.

Big whales swim to a quiet bay in Argentina.

They have their babies there. Penguins build nests there too. Guanacos are wild cousins of llamas. Jaguars live in warm forests in the north.

UNESCO calls Península Valdés, on the Patagonian coast, the most important place in the world where southern right whales breed. More than 1,500 of them visit each year to give birth and raise their calves. Elephant seals, sea lions and tens of thousands of nesting Magellanic penguins live there too.

On the dry Patagonian steppe live guanacos, wild relatives of the llama, and the Patagonian mara, a rodent found only in Argentina. In the warm north, the forests of the Chaco and Mesopotamia are home to jaguars, pumas, tapirs, capybaras and toucans.

UNESCO describes Península Valdés (inscribed 1999) as the world's most important breeding ground of the southern right whale, with more than 1,500 animals visiting each year, a key site in the species' recovery from commercial whaling. It also holds the northernmost colonies of southern elephant seals, the only breeding population in continental Argentina, plus southern sea lions, tens of thousands of nesting Magellanic penguins and 181 recorded bird species. Its small local group of orcas strands itself on purpose on the beaches to catch young seals and sea lions.

On land, guanacos and the Patagonian mara, a rodent endemic to Argentina, graze the Patagonian desert steppe. Britannica notes that guanacos are now rare in Patagonia and no longer found in the Pampas, where cattle, horses and crops now cover much of the land and many native animal populations have dwindled, though flightless rheas remain. The Chaco and Mesopotamia hold jaguars, pumas, ocelots, tapirs, peccaries, capybaras and toucans, and Iguazú's Atlantic Forest supports around 400 bird species, including the harpy eagle.

Spanish is the main language of Argentina.

Most people live in towns and cities. Lots of people love to grill beef. Friends often share a warm drink called maté. Many people love football.

Spanish is Argentina's national language, but it has picked up many words from other languages, especially Italian. Italian immigrants had the biggest influence of any group on Argentine culture. In parts of Patagonia, some people still speak Welsh and English, brought by settlers long ago.

Meals mix old and new. Breakfast is often coffee and sweet rolls called medialunas, and beef cooked on a grill called a parrilla is the meat most people prefer. Maté, a tea-like drink made from yerba maté leaves, is sipped from a gourd through a strainer, either alone or shared with others. Football (soccer) is hugely popular, and Argentina has won the World Cup three times.

Britannica describes most people in Argentina as descended from European immigrants: almost half of the late-19th- and early-20th-century arrivals were Italian and about a third Spanish, and by 1914 the foreign-born made up about a third of the population. Indigenous peoples, including the Diaguita, Guaraní, Querandí and Tehuelche, lived across the land before Spanish colonization. Spanish is the national language; Italian is still widely heard in Buenos Aires, and Welsh and English survive in parts of Patagonia. About four-fifths of people are at least nominally Roman Catholic, and the Jewish community is the largest in South America.

City life follows a southern European rhythm, with supper often after 9:00 pm. Grilled beef dominates the diet, chimichurri sauce is used widely, and maté is shared from a gourd as a social ritual. Primary school is compulsory and free. The tango, developed in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, was added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2009, and the national football team won the World Cup in 1978, 1986 and 2022.