Benoit's design is almost obsessive in its order. The city is a square crossed by two grand diagonals running corner to corner, with shorter diagonals threading the blocks. Every street is numbered, and the same six-by-six block module repeats across the plan, a small park or plaza set down at every interval. Yet many observers see more than geometry. Both Rocha and Benoit were Freemasons, and the city's layout and its monuments are widely read as carrying strong Masonic symbolism. Whether you see esoteric meaning or simply rigorous logic, the effect on the ground is the same: La Plata is a city you can read like a diagram, its avenues converging on a single ceremonial heart at Plaza Moreno.

Because the city was created whole, its grandest buildings were commissioned through international competitions, and the winners came from across Europe: Italians designed the Governor's Palace, Germans the City Hall, and so on, each landmark a different national hand. La Plata switched on electric street lighting in 1884, the first city in Latin America to do so. Looming over Plaza Moreno is the neo-Gothic cathedral, the largest church in Argentina, its twin spires among the tallest of any church in the world. The young city dazzled abroad too: at the 1889 Paris Exposition it won gold medals as a City of the Future, and the novelist Jules Verne is said to have handed the award to Dardo Rocha himself.

La Plata is also la ciudad de los tilos, the city of linden trees, named for the ranks of lindens shading its streets and squares, joined by ash, plane, sweetgum and tulip trees imported from the Northern Hemisphere. Greenery is everywhere, anchored by the vast Paseo del Bosque, the forest park that holds the zoo, the botanical garden, a Victorian astronomical observatory and the famous natural history museum. At the city's core is the National University of La Plata, founded in the 1890s and now one of Argentina's largest, with tens of thousands of students. Its halls have produced an extraordinary roster: the heart surgeon Rene Favaloro, who pioneered the coronary bypass; the novelist Ernesto Sabato, who began as a physicist; the Nobel Peace laureate Carlos Saavedra Lamas; and several Argentine presidents, including Raul Alfonsin and Nestor Kirchner.

A planned city is not spared history's cruelties. In 1977 a catastrophic fire gutted the Teatro Argentino, one of the country's great opera houses, an irreplaceable loss to the city's heritage. Darker still was the dictatorship that seized power in 1976. La Plata's universities and high schools were centers of student activism, and the regime answered with kidnapping, torture and murder. Among the disappeared were teenagers from the city's high-school student union, young people who had organized for nothing more dangerous than school reform, and many of them were never seen again, still counted among Argentina's desaparecidos. The grief of those years is woven into the same streets that hold the city's fireworks and festivals, including the burning of giant papier-mache figures every New Year's Eve, a tradition La Plata shares with its neighbors Berisso and Ensenada.

For all its planned perfection, La Plata pulses with ordinary passion, and nowhere louder than in football. The city is split between two first-division clubs: Estudiantes de La Plata, the most decorated, winners of multiple Copa Libertadores titles and the 1968 Intercontinental Cup over Manchester United, and the older Gimnasia y Esgrima. Estudiantes gave Argentine football a whole philosophy of play and a lineage of legendary managers. Around the stadiums and the linden-lined avenues, students from across the country fill the cafes and lecture halls, giving this drawn-from-scratch capital something its planners could never have rendered on paper: the messy, multicultural life of a real city.