Villa Gesell

We drove down from Mar del Plata expecting more of the same and got something quite different. Villa Gesell has none of Mardel’s casino-and-Rambla grandeur — instead it has pine trees, an enormous number of them, planted deliberately by the town’s founder, Carlos Idaho Gesell, starting in the 1930s on what had been nothing but bare dunes. The forest he planted is now so established it’s hard to believe the whole thing is artificial, and it gives the town a hushed, almost Nordic feel that’s unlike anywhere else on this coast.

Dunes and Pines

The dunes themselves are still the dominant geography south of town, where the pine forest hasn’t taken hold, and walking out from the beach into that transition — packed wet sand, then loose dune grass, then suddenly dense pine shade — is a strange, quick shift in landscape. We rented bikes and rode a good stretch of it at sunset, the light coming through the trees in long orange bands.

Gesell’s founder built the town with wide, tree-lined avenues rather than a dense grid, and it shows — even in peak season, the place absorbs crowds without feeling as saturated as Mar del Plata an hour up the coast. It draws a younger, more bohemian crowd too, with a beach handicraft fair along Avenida 3 that runs every summer night, artisans selling leather, silver, and woodwork under the pines.

The Beach Itself

The beach is wide, clean, and considerably calmer in energy than Mardel’s — surfers cluster at a handful of known breaks near the pier, and further out from the center, the dunes give way to nearly empty stretches of sand if you’re willing to walk. Lia and I found a spot a twenty-minute walk south of the center that we had entirely to ourselves on a Saturday in January, which felt almost implausible for the peak of Argentine summer.

When to go: January and February for full summer energy and the nightly handicraft fair; December and March offer the same pine-forest calm with noticeably thinner crowds.