Before the oil, Comodoro Rivadavia was a small port serving the inland farming town of Sarmiento, founded around the turn of the twentieth century on a hard, dry stretch of Patagonian coast. The 1907 discovery changed everything. The Argentine oil industry began here, on a legal foundation laid by the 1886 National Mining Code, which declared that the country's oil fields belonged to the State while allowing private companies to work them by concession. Drilling spread fast. By 1933 some 1,648 wells had been sunk around Comodoro Rivadavia, and nearly nine in ten of them produced. The city quite literally grew out of the oil camps, which thickened into the neighborhoods that still make up much of the urban map today.

In 1922, President Hipolito Yrigoyen's government created YPF, Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales, to manage the nation's petroleum, with the engineer Enrique Mosconi as its first director. YPF holds a notable place in industrial history: it was the first state oil company outside the Soviet Union and the first state oil company to become fully vertically integrated, controlling extraction, refining, transport, and distribution under one roof. For Comodoro, YPF was more than an employer. It built housing, provided health care, and shaped daily life across the oil districts. The city's airport and one of its central institutions still carry Mosconi's name, a reminder of how completely the company and the place grew up together.

Comodoro Rivadavia has an unusual way of naming itself. Because it expanded outward along the routes connecting scattered oil camps, neighborhoods are still known by their distance from the center: Kilometer 3, Kilometer 4, Kilometer 5, and on outward. Kilometer 4 is home to the National University of Patagonia San Juan Bosco; Kilometer 6 holds the airport. The city spreads across three broad zones, North, South, and Downtown, beneath the blunt mass of Chenque Hill, the landmark that looms over the port and gives the place its silhouette. Comodoro grew fast in recent decades, its population swelling by roughly a third between 2001 and 2010, far outpacing the national rate, as oil work continued to draw people to the coast. With more than 182,000 residents counted in 2010, it is the largest city in southern Patagonia, the sprawling stretch of Argentina that runs from Chubut all the way to Tierra del Fuego, and the biggest settlement anywhere south of the Colorado River.

The same fierce wind that punishes this coast has become a resource in its own right. Comodoro's wind farm, with 26 generators, was for a time among the most important in Latin America, harnessing the gales that howl off the Patagonian plateau. The city's beaches and steady wind have also made nearby Rada Tilly a hub for land yachting, which hosted its world championship there in 2008. Yet oil remains the foundation. The San Jorge Gulf is among Argentina's leading oil-producing zones, and the rhythms of the global petroleum market still set the tempo of a city that has lived by crude for over a century. Comodoro Rivadavia endures as exactly what that 1907 well made it: Argentina's capital of oil, perched at the windy edge of the continent.