The country's first entirely planned city, La Plata was officially founded on November 19, 1882. Electric street lighting was installed in 1884 - it was the first city in Latin America to do so. The grand ambitions held for the new provincial capital can be gauged by the local writer José María Lunazzi's comment, made soon after the city's founding, that La Plata was the "Athens of America". Unfortunately, though, much of La Plata's carefully conceived architectural identity was lost during the twentieth century, as anonymous modern constructions replaced many of the city's original buildings. A particularly sad example was the loss of the grand Italianate Teatro Argentino , second in national importance after Buenos Aires' Teatro Colón, razed to the ground after a suspect fire in the 1970s and rebuilt as a massive octagonal concrete monolith. Nonetheless, enough of the city's original features remain for it to have made a recent serious bid to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Whether or not the bid is successful, the project will at least have had the positive effect of encouraging the preservation of the city's remaining architectural heritage - a symptom of this changing attitude is the recent completion of the city's imposing Gothic cathedral, over a hundred years after its foundation stone was laid. Hotels in La Plata |
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