Corrientes is for the most part well watered, and has immense tracts of excellent pasturage.
Besides its Capital, Corrientes possesses as its, even more commercially important, centres the towns of Goya, famous for its cheeses, Ituzaingó, Bella Vista, and Empedrado, all ports or rather possible ports on the Paraná, Mercedes, the centre of prosperous sheep-farming districts, and Curuzú Cuatia and Monte Caseros, with good railroad facilities.
With the necessary expenditure on wharves, etc., Corrientes could be brought into a much greater economic activity than it shows signs of as yet; by utilizing its great natural riparian means of communication, although the River Uruguay is at this height difficult of navigation, owing chiefly to the rapidity of its current and frequent floods.
The Correntino has not yet, however, developed much commercial enterprise. His cattle still show the native long horned and limbed characteristics of wilder days and he himself seems to find it less trouble to get tobacco, mate, sugar, coffee and many other things from Brazil or Paraguay than to grow and manufacture them himself; as he could do easily and profitably. Much of his nature is Indian; to be modified in time by the overwhelming forces of civilization.
One cannot leave Corrientes without mention of the lake Iberá in the North of the Province, a vast natural hollow filled with water, the surface of which is in many parts covered so solidly with interlaced bamboos, grasses and aquatic plants as to enable one to walk on it as if on a huge raft. There has been much talk of reclaiming the land by draining Lake Iberá, a task which owing to the gradients of the surrounding lands would not present great difficulties; if so be that the lake is not connected by subterranean channels with the Rivers Paraná and Upper Uruguay, as there are several reasons to suppose it may be.
The islands of this lake form a perfect zoological garden of animals and reptiles long since practically extinct in the surrounding country; among which are Jaguars, Alligators and Boa Constrictors.
The present writer remembers an interesting if somewhat terrifying collection of such and other wild specimens being cast up a little more than a decade ago on the river shores of the Province of Buenos Aires, near to the Federal Capital, by the swollen waters of the Paraná during extraordinary floods. These creatures were washed down clinging to trunks of trees and islets of intertwined vegetation which had been torn away by the force of the waters. It is safe to assume that they were much more terrified than were even the peaceable inhabitants of the places where they involuntarily landed.
The illustrious General San Martin was a Correntino, born in what was once called Yapeyú, now an important Live Stock centre and renamed after him.
A monument has also been erected there to his memory, a patriotic embellishment which no Argentine township, however, is without.