La Plata

I first came to La Plata on a day trip from Buenos Aires and left three hours later understanding that I had misunderstood the city entirely. I came back the following weekend and stayed two nights, which was what it deserved. The capital of Buenos Aires province was planned from scratch in 1882 — an instant city built on a grid of precise squares and diagonal avenues that bisect every block, giving the whole place a geometric rationalism you feel before you understand it. Walking the streets, you keep arriving at unexpected angles, at six-way intersections where the diagonals meet the grid and small plazas appear like parentheses. The city’s designers were French and German, its architecture is eclectic European, and the result is a place that feels like someone had Buenos Aires as a brief and then made something more rigorous.

The cathedral is the first thing. It rises in the center of the city on the main plaza, a neo-Gothic pile of grey stone begun in 1884 and completed — largely — in 1932, with the towers finished only in 1999 after a campaign of public financing that took decades. It is the largest neo-Gothic church in South America and one of the finest in the world, and the interior is as extraordinary as the exterior: a nave so long that the altar seems to recede into a different atmospheric zone, the light filtering through blue and gold glass, the stone pillars massive and cold. I went on a Tuesday afternoon when it was almost empty and sat in the back for a while doing nothing in particular, which is the correct use of a cathedral.

The city is also home to three of the best museums in Argentina, which the tourist literature does not make nearly enough noise about. The Museo de Ciencias Naturales — housed in a spectacular Beaux-Arts building in the Paseo del Bosque park — holds one of the five best natural history collections in the world. Its paleontology rooms are extraordinary: a complete Diplodocus skeleton, a Titanosaurus that fills an entire hall, and a collection of Argentine dinosaur finds that would be celebrated anywhere. Equally good, and almost never visited by people who don’t live in the city, is the Museo de Arte de La Plata, which holds the estate collection of a local patron who assembled, in the early twentieth century, a set of Argentine and European works that have no business being this good.

Food in La Plata has a student-city character — the national university is here, enormous and serious, and a quarter of the city’s population is either studying or teaching — which means cheap, unpretentious, and better than you’d expect. The Pasaje Dardo Rocha, a nineteenth-century covered arcade on the main boulevard, holds a series of bars and cafés where you can eat well for very little. Order the humita en chala — a steamed corn tamale in a corn-husk wrapper — when it appears on menus. It is not something you find everywhere.

The Paseo del Bosque, the large park that runs along the city’s eastern edge, is where the city’s character becomes most readable. On weekend mornings it holds a considerable fraction of La Plata’s population: joggers, families, cycling clubs, students reading on benches, dog walkers with the full metropolitan array of breeds. The park has a lake, a small zoo that is in the process of being converted to a refuge rather than a captive facility, and several open-air theatres where on summer evenings there are free concerts of everything from tango to Argentine rock. I ate a medialunas from a kiosk beside the lake and watched a pair of kayakers do slow circles on the water and thought: this city really did work out.

When to go: La Plata is a year-round city — air-conditioned museums and indoor cafés make summer bearable, and the university calendar means the city stays lively even in winter. May and October are ideal for the Bosque park and outdoor life. Avoid major football fixture days at Estadio Ciudad de La Plata unless you plan to attend, as the city fills unpredictably.