Córdoba began as New Andalusia on the Suquía
Argentina's second-largest city, home to about 1.6 million people, sits in the Sierras Chicas foothills on the Suquía River, some 700 km northwest of Buenos Aires. Jerónimo Luis de Cabrera founded it on 6 July 1573 as Córdoba de la Nueva Andalucía.
In 1570 Francisco de Toledo, Viceroy of Peru, told Cabrera to found and populate a settlement in the Punilla Valley. His party of a hundred reached the site on 24 June 1573 and called the river San Juan. The town's name may honour the Spanish forebears of Cabrera's wife, who came from Córdoba in Spain. The land belonged to the Comechingones, who lived in communities called ayllus, and after four years of fending off attacks the settlers moved to the far bank in 1577, where Lieutenant Governor Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa laid out a 70-block grid. Trade with northern cities then made it prosper.
Jesuits arrived in 1599 and opened a college in 1610 that became the University of Córdoba in 1613, the oldest in Argentina and fourth oldest in the Americas; hence the nickname La Docta, the learned. Their 17th-century Jesuit Block, with the Monserrat school and old campus, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000. Five rural estancias, among them Alta Gracia and Jesús María, paid for it all until Charles III expelled the order in 1767, after which Franciscans took over.
The city had some 22,000 residents in 1760. During the May Revolution of 1810 leading citizens stayed loyal to Ferdinand VII, backing the Liniers counter-revolution, though Dean Gregorio Funes sided with the rebels. In the caudillo era Governor Juan Bautista Bustos repelled an 1821 invasion by Francisco Ramírez and the Chilean José Miguel Carrera.
From the late nineteenth century Italian and Spanish immigrants fuelled industrial growth. The city is also remembered for the 1918 University Reform and the Cordobazo uprising of May 1969.
Source: Córdoba, Argentina
