ABSTRACT
Twenty years after the arrival at the Rio de la Plata of a Spanish expedition, led by Juan Díaz de Solís, the members of which were immediately massacred and, according to some narratives, devoured by the Indians, the city of Buenos Aires was founded for the first time by Pedro de Mendoza in 1536. This first European settlement in the area ‘where Juan Díaz fasted and the Indians dined’, as Jorge Luis Borges puts it in Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires (Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires) (1923: 81), collapsed in only a few years because of hunger, disease, quarrels, internal cannibalism and the military pressure of a local tribe, the querandíes. A long time had to pass until the second founding of Buenos Aires by Juan de Garay, who in the name of the Spanish crown massacred the querandíes, apportioned lots of land to his troops, and for these same troops enslaved the people of a nearby tribe, the guaraníes. On 11 June 1580 the new town was christened Ciudad de La Santísima Trinidad y Puerto de Santa María del Buen Ayre; the cathedral, the Franciscan and Benedictine convents, and the Jesuit school where among its first buildings. Garay was killed by the Indians four years later, but the city became in time the capital of the Rio de la Plata viceroyalty and then, after the 1810 Mayo Revolution, that of the Argentine Republic (Saer, 1991; Bernand, 1997; Guérin, 2000).
