Darwin had not expected much from this stretch of coast. The land around Bahía Blanca was flat, scrubby, and unpromising. Then he reached the little cliff at Punta Alta and saw the fossils protruding from it, gigantic and strange. Over several visits he extracted skeletons of creatures that would later be named and studied back in England: Megatherium and Mylodon, the ground sloths, and the armadillo-like glyptodonts. Because these animals were so large and so obviously gone, Darwin could be reasonably certain they no longer existed anywhere. Extinction was real, and it had happened here. The bones, shipped home and studied by the anatomist Richard Owen, became part of the long, slow argument that would eventually produce On the Origin of Species. A grain of that revolution came from this ordinary-looking Argentine shore.

Punta Alta itself is younger than Darwin's visit, founded on 2 July 1898 beside what would become Puerto Belgrano, the largest naval base in Argentina. The rhythm of the city still follows the fleet: warships in the dry docks, sailors in the streets, the whole economy turning on the work of the harbor. Early in the twentieth century, French capital poured in. A company organized in Paris, backed by lenders including the Banque Paribas, built a railway from the river port of Rosario down to Punta Alta, opened in 1910, and began constructing a grain terminal meant to be the largest in South America. The First World War froze those grand plans half-finished. The port was nationalized under Perón in 1947 and renamed Puerto Rosales, and the dream of a great export gateway never fully arrived.

Long before the navy or the railway, the plains around Punta Alta belonged to indigenous communities, among them the families of Linares and Ancalao who had lived alongside the frontier garrison of Bahía Blanca since the 1820s. As the military port rose, those communities were pushed off their land. In 1912 the Ancalao families began a long exodus toward Río Negro, evicted from acreage the province had sold out from under them. One man refused to leave. Fermín González Ancalao, known to everyone simply as the Indian Fermín, was born around 1873 and spent decades petitioning presidents and clutching old surveyors' letters that proved he had helped lay out the very railway that displaced him. He never recovered his land. He worked in the naval workshops until he retired in 1941, proud to call himself the base's first retired Indian, and old residents still remembered the small, stooped man riding everywhere with a guitar slung over his shoulder. He died, nearly blind and well past a hundred, in 1959. His memory remains woven into the town that grew over the ground he claimed.

Punta Alta has always been a place people come to. Italians and Spaniards formed the early backbone of the town, joined over the decades by thousands of families from Argentina's far north, the provinces of Jujuy and Salta, drawn by work at the base. The result is a genuinely mixed city, where provincial social clubs sit beside Italian and Spanish associations, and the literacy rate runs near complete. Punta Alta carries one other quiet distinction worth noting: in 1927 it founded the first electric cooperative in Argentina, a member-owned utility that still powers the district today and now draws part of its energy from the Centennial wind farm spinning on the nearby plains. For a town that began as a service settlement for the fleet, it has built something durable of its own.