Argentina means silver land on a Venetian 1536 map
The Argentine Republic covers about 2,780,085 km²—South America's second-largest country after Brazil and the world's eighth. Paleolithic humans, Inca northwest edges, and sixteenth-century Spanish colonisation shaped it. The name, from Latin argentum for silver, appears on a 1536 Venetian map after Río de la Plata explorers chased metal rumours.
Butchery marks on the bones of an extinct armoured mammal found near Buenos Aires in 2015 suggest people were here about 21,000 years ago, at the height of the last Ice Age. At Piedra Museo in Santa Cruz, spear points some 11,000 years old lie with remains of giant ground sloths and ancient horses, and the stencilled hands of the Cueva de las Manos were painted between 7,300 BC and AD 700. Later peoples ranged from potteryless Selkʼnam and Yaghan foragers in the far south to Guaraní farmers in the northeast and Diaguita traders in the northwest, whom the Inca conquered around 1480.
Amerigo Vespucci sailed past in 1502. Pedro de Mendoza's first Buenos Aires, founded in 1536, was abandoned by 1541, and Juan de Garay refounded it in 1580. Spain valued the land mainly as a backdoor to Peruvian and Bolivian silver, keeping it under Peru until the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was created in 1776. The first written Spanish use of the country's name is a 1602 poem, La Argentina; the formal title Argentine Republic was fixed by decree in 1860, and English speakers long called it simply "the Argentine."
Buenos Aires beat off British invasions in 1806 and 1807, and the May Revolution of 1810 replaced the viceroy with a local junta. Independence was declared at Tucumán on 9 July 1816, after delegates weighed and rejected a plan to crown a descendant of the Inca. The privateer Hippolyte Bouchard raided Spanish California and the Philippines, and historians say Hawaii's King Kamehameha I was the first ruler to recognise the new state. José de San Martín then led an army across the Andes to free Chile and Peru.
Civil war lasted until 1880, after which millions of mostly Italian and Spanish immigrants arrived. Five coups followed the first in 1930, and the junta that seized power in 1976 killed thousands in the Dirty War before elections returned in 1983. Today the federation of 23 provinces plus Buenos Aires has South America's second-largest economy and sits in the G20.
Source: Argentina
