Qualla: Plaza de Mayo

Plaza de Mayo: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Balou46, CC BY-SA 4.0. Whatever has mattered most in Argentina has happened in this square. Revolutions were proclaimed here and dictators acclaimed here. Crowds have packed it to cheer a war and to bury its dead, to demand bread and to demand the truth. When Juan de Garay founded Buenos Aires in 1580, he set aside an open lot at the centre of his riverbank settlement, and across four and a half centuries that bare patch of ground became the stage on which the country argued with itself. The Plaza de Mayo is not Argentina's prettiest square. It is its most necessary one, the place a nation comes when it has something it cannot keep to itself.

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Image: Balou46 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Plaza de Mayo: The Square the City Grew Around

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mr. Tickle, CC BY 2.5. For centuries this was two plazas, not one. A colonnade called the Recova, completed in 1804, split the space into the Plaza de la Victoria on one side and, toward the river fort, the Plaza del Fuerte on the other. In 1811 the May Pyramid rose in the western half to mark the firs...

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Image: Mr. Tickle | CC BY 2.5

Plaza de Mayo: The Pink House and the Balcony

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Guillaume Baviere from Uppsala, Sweden, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Casa Rosada, seat of Argentina's president, gives the plaza its colour and its drama. From its balcony, leaders have spoken to oceans of people filling the square below, none more famously than Juan and Eva Perón, whose rallies drew vast working-class crowds in the 1940s and ...

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Image: Guillaume Baviere from Uppsala, Sweden | CC BY-SA 2.0

Plaza de Mayo: The Mothers and the White Kerchiefs

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The square's most enduring image is also its quietest. Beginning in 1977, at the height of the military dictatorship, mothers of the desaparecidos, the disappeared, began gathering here to demand their children back. These were people, often young, who had been seized by the stat...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Plaza de Mayo: The Living Stage

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit user:Sking, CC BY-SA 3.0. The plaza never stopped being a place where the nation gathers. Crowds filled it on 2 April 1982 to cheer the seizure of the Falkland Islands, and the same ground heard the silence when that war was lost. During the economic collapse of December 2001, protests around the square t...

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Image: user:Sking | CC BY-SA 3.0