Photograph by Soc. Fotografica de Aficionados.

Plate XXIV.

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The primitive urban sites were all either on the river or on the historic roads to Chile and Peru. The only towns of the Paraná region at the end of the eighteenth century were Buenos Aires, Santa Fé and Corrientes. As to towns in the interior, Helms's journey in 1778 gives us some idea of their size. Córdoba, at the crossing of the Peru road and the tracks to the province of La Rioja, had then 1,500 white inhabitants and 4,000 blacks. As it was near the Sierra, which provided granite and lime, it had some semblance of architecture, and had paved streets, which struck even the traveller from Buenos Aires. The attraction of its schools was felt over a wide area. We still have a list of students from Paraguay who studied at Córdoba University in the eighteenth century.[143] Tucumán and Salta, especially Salta, also were busy centres. Salta had 600 Spanish families and 9,000 inhabitants in all, and its influence extended as far as Peru and Chile. Jujuy, on the other hand, was a very small town. Helms mentions the decay of Santiago del Estero. The trade which had once flourished there had, he says, gone in a different direction. The prosperity of Santiago was, as a matter of fact, connected with traffic on the direct route from Santa Fé to Tucumán, which ceased at the close of the eighteenth century. Santa Fé also was a decaying town at the close of the eighteenth century, and would remain such until the middle of the nineteenth. Its distress was due, not merely to the suspension of its direct trade with Peru, but also to the decay and isolation of Paraguay, which had provided most of its trade and for which it acted as intermediary with the Andean provinces.

The great development of urban life in Argentina dates from the time of the colonization of the Pampean region. The ratio of the urban population has risen considerably during the last twenty-five years. In 1895, 113 centres with more than 2,000 inhabitants comprised 37 per cent. of the total population of Argentina; in 1914 the number of urban centres was 322, and they comprised 53 per cent. of the population. The population of towns with 5,000 to 20,000 inhabitants has increased threefold in twenty years, rising from 312,000 in 1895 to 977,000 in 1914. Large new towns like Rosario and Bahía Blanca were created. The relative sizes of the older towns changed rapidly. Tucumán and Mendoza (121,000 and 92,000 inhabitants) shot beyond Santiago and Salta (22,000 and 28,000 inhabitants). The towns of the north-west, Catamarca and Rioja, are, on the other hand, scarcely developed.

When one examines a chart of the urban population of the Pampean region, one finds that colonization has led to the creation in it of ten chief centres, of from 15,000 to 25,000 inhabitants, and some fifty secondary centres, of from 5,000 to 12,000 inhabitants, which all have a distinctly urban character. This association of urban centres and a scattered agricultural or pastoral population is one of the original features of the way in which the Pampa was peopled. There is no village, or purely rural group. The distribution of these centres on the plain is fairly regular. They are a little closer together in the districts near the Paraná, to the north of Buenos Aires, where the population is older, and where the density, even of the rural population, is at its highest. The territory of the Pampa is divided between the spheres of influence of these various centres. Their radius is as low as ten miles in the north-west, and is about twenty miles in the south of Buenos Aires and twenty-five in the extreme west.

A secondary railway nucleus has generally settled the sites of them (San Francisco-Pergamino, Junin). Their population comprises all the workers needed for the flow of the economic life of the Pampa: agents for the exporters of cereals, merchants who supply the colonies with imported goods—especially agricultural machinery—bankers and insurance companies, surveyors and lawyers. Those which have the best service of trains have a certain amount of industry—mills and breweries—the products of which are absorbed locally. These towns derive all the elements of their life from the Pampean region itself, and have no direct relations either with foreign markets or with other parts of Argentina.[144]

But the towns of the Pampa which have grown most rapidly are the ports. Rosario rose from 23,000 inhabitants in 1869 to 91,000 in 1895 and to 245,000 in 1914; Bahía Blanca from 9,000 in 1895 to 62,000 in 1914. The actual population of the Pampa ports is not at all in proportion to the part which each plays in the export of Pampean products:—