On Argentina's Atlantic Coast, in Buenos Aires Province, two of the country's most visited beach towns tell almost opposite origin stories. One took shape around a railway line and a luxury hotel; the other began as 16.48 square kilometres of loose, wind-blown dune that had to be deliberately planted into stillness before a town could exist on it at all.
Mar del Plata was founded on 10 February 1874, when merchant and landowner Patricio Peralta Ramos bought a disused saladero (a salting works) and its small port from the Portuguese entrepreneur José Coelho de Meirelles. For over a decade it remained a modest settlement. What changed its trajectory was a railway: the line from Buenos Aires opened in 1886, bringing the capital's upper class to the coast as tourists for the first time.
The beach itself only got its name in 1888, with the opening of the three-storey Hotel Bristol — a building grand enough to turn an unremarkable stretch of sand into the fashionable destination for Buenos Aires society. By 1907, when Mar del Plata was formally declared a city, it was already being called the "Argentine Biarritz." The seafront went through a whole sequence of ramblas (boardwalks) after that: a wooden one built in the 1880s, then the Rambla Pellegrini, the Rambla Lasalle, and finally the ornate Rambla Bristol of 1913, styled after Belgian seaside architecture.
The current Rambla Casino, next to the Hotel Provincial, dates to 1939 — a French neoclassical design by architect Alejandro Bustillo, still marked today by the sea lion sculptures artist José Fioravanti added to the seafront. From the 1940s, as apartment ownership spread beyond the elite, Playa Bristol became accessible to Argentina's middle class too, and visitor numbers multiplied. The result is a working urban beach — about 2 km of golden sand backed by cafés and lifeguard posts, with moderate Atlantic swell rather than flat, sheltered water. Today Mar del Plata, Argentina's fifth-largest city with 682,605 residents at the 2022 census, still draws around eight million tourists a year, most of them between December and March.
A hundred kilometres up the coast, Villa Gesell's origin has nothing to do with a hotel. In 1931, Carlos Idaho Gesell — son of the German economist Silvio Gesell — bought roughly 16.48 km² of dune land for 28,000 pesos, planning to grow pine trees to supply timber for his family's furniture business. The dunes fought back: salt-laden Atlantic wind kept undoing the young plantings and shifting the sand out from under them.
The breakthrough came after Carlos Gesell brought in German agronomist Carlos Bodesheim in 1934. Their method was two-stage: first anchor the loose sand with hardy weeds, then plant trees with roots deep enough to reach groundwater. In 1938 they added Australian Acacia longifolia, a nitrogen-fixing species that tolerates salt and sand far better than pine — it sheltered the young forest until it could establish on its own. Gesell moved to the site permanently from 1937, and in 1940 opened a small guesthouse, "La Golondrina," almost as an afterthought; word of mouth among those first guests is what actually built Villa Gesell's tourism trade, which never really stopped growing. By the 2022 census the town had 37,325 residents, up 26% from 2010.
Villa Gesell's beach today runs about 10 km along a gentle slope, watched over by roughly 150 lifeguards in season, and reaches some 21 km once the annexed resorts of Mar de las Pampas, Las Gaviotas and Mar Azul are counted in. North of town, Pinar del Norte — the pine forest Gesell himself planted — now shelters more than 100 plant species. About 30 km south stands the Querandí Lighthouse, the first structure ever built in the district: first lit on 27 October 1922, it stands 54 metres tall, the second-tallest lighthouse on the Argentine coast, with a 276-step staircase inside its black-and-white banded tower.
One recent, concrete difference between the two towns: for the 2025/26 summer season, Villa Gesell expanded its "Playas Accesibles" (Accessible Beaches) programme to 15 participating balnearios (beach clubs), offering amphibious beach chairs, accessible pathways, adapted bathrooms and, at some venues, Braille menus. Balneario Noctiluca runs a dedicated "Playa Integrada" from 9am to 7pm with trained staff, and holders of Argentina's disability certificate (CUD) get discounts of 30 to 100% at participating venues — a programme built on the same practical, do-it-yourself instinct that turned a stand of planted pines into a town in the first place.
Both towns sit within the Atlantic Coast region of Buenos Aires Province and share its oceanic climate — mild summers, cool winters — but the extremes diverge: Villa Gesell has recorded a summer high of 42.3°C and a winter low of −7.8°C, while Mar del Plata's averages run milder, around 20.4°C in January and 7.5°C in July. Both draw their crowds squarely between December and Easter, when Argentina's traditional beach season ends. Mar del Plata is reachable by its own airport (Astor Piazzolla International), daily trains from Buenos Aires' Constitución station, or the Route 2 highway; Villa Gesell, about 376 km from the capital, leans more on its own regional airport and bus connections during peak season.
What the two towns share, in the end, isn't really their sand — Playa Bristol is a dense, built-up city beach, while Villa Gesell's coastline still reads as a forest town that happens to face the ocean. What they share is that neither beach existed as a destination until someone decided to force it into being: a hotelier's railway on one stretch of coast, a furniture-maker's forestry experiment on another.
It's named after the Hotel Bristol, a three-storey hotel that opened on the site in 1888 and turned the stretch of sand into Buenos Aires high society's preferred coastal destination.
The site was 16.48 km² of loose, wind-blown sand dunes. Early tree-planting attempts failed until Carlos Gesell's team learned to anchor the sand with hardy weeds first, then introduced salt-tolerant Australian acacia in 1938 to shelter the pines until they could establish themselves.
For the 2025/26 summer season, 15 of Villa Gesell's beach clubs (balnearios) offer amphibious beach chairs, accessible pathways and adapted facilities for visitors with reduced mobility, with discounts for holders of Argentina's CUD disability certificate.
Picked by the editorial team.
