Long before the parasols, this was a hard shore. The Gununa Kena, northern Tehuelche nomads, lived here for centuries, later shaped by Mapuche culture. Sir Francis Drake reconnoitered the coast and its sea lion colonies in the 16th century; Juan de Garay explored by land in 1581. The early European story is mostly shipwreck and survival. In 1742, during the War of Jenkins' Ear, eight survivors of Admiral Anson's expedition, led by the midshipman Isaac Morris, endured a ten-month ordeal on this coast before being captured by the Tehuelches, who eventually handed them to the Spaniards; Morris made it back to London in 1746. A Jesuit colonization attempt near the Laguna de los Padres ended in disaster in 1751. The town itself was finally founded on 10 February 1874 by Patricio Peralta Ramos, on the site of an abandoned meat-salting works near Cabo Corrientes.

Everything changed in 1886, when the railway from Buenos Aires reached the village. The upper-class families of the capital arrived first, building a French-style resort and a European architecture of picturesque chalets - stone facades, gabled roofs of Spanish and French tile, deep eaves and front porches - that earned the town its nickname, the Argentine Biarritz. On 19 July 1907 the province declared Mar del Plata a city. But the place refused to stay a playground for the rich. In 1919 it became the first town in South America to elect a Socialist mayor, Teodoro Bronzini, the son of Italian immigrants, and the Socialist Party would shape its politics for most of the century. Local architects like Auro Tiribelli later shrank the grand summer villas into a middle-class vernacular all its own, the Mar del Plata Style, before the tourist boom of the 1960s answered with apartment towers downtown.

Walk down to the port and the postcard gives way to a fishing town. Mar del Plata's harbor, inaugurated in 1916, is home to the lanchas amarillas - the small, brightly painted yellow wooden boats that work these waters - and to fish-processing plants and at least two large shipyards. Sea lions loll on the breakwaters near the men mending nets. Tourism is the main economy, but it is far from the only one: textiles, food, polymers, and a packaging-machine industry good enough to export tea-bagging designs abroad. Since the 1980s, electronics and then software firms have taken root, and in 2012 the area even became a wine region, with vineyards at Chapadmalal beach producing Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay and Riesling. Microbreweries that flourished through the 2010s grew to roughly a third of national production.

When the season opens, the whole city becomes a stage. Summer brings more than fifty theatrical plays, the Fiesta Nacional del Mar with its crowned Sea Queen, the Sea Star Awards for the best of the season, and the Mar del Plata International Film Festival - the only A-class festival in Latin America. The city has hosted the 1995 Pan American Games, co-hosted the 1978 World Cup at the purpose-built Estadio Jose Maria Minella, and welcomed the 4th Summit of the Americas in 2005. Its famous names are just as varied: the tango revolutionary Astor Piazzolla, born here; the poet Alfonsina Storni, who walked into the sea at La Perla beach; the tennis champion Guillermo Vilas - whose between-the-legs 'tweener' shot Argentines still call the Gran Willy - and the World Cup-winning goalkeeper Emiliano 'Dibu' Martinez. It is a deep bench for a city this size.

The weather here has its own personality. Mar del Plata sits in an oceanic climate, milder than the inland Pampas - around 20.4 degrees C on an average January day, 7.5 in July - but exposed to whatever the South Atlantic sends. The southeasterly Sudestada whips up rough seas, coastal showers and sudden squalls; polar air from Antarctica pushes through in winter. Snow is rare but not unheard of, dusting the beaches in memorable storms like those of 1975 and 1991. The record high reached 42.4 degrees C in January 2022. Spring is the trickster season, capable of a 30-degree heat wave one week and a late frost the next. It is a coast of moods - and that restlessness, as much as the sunshine, is what keeps drawing eight million people back to the edge of the continent every year.