The name is a memory of something that no longer roams here. In the city's early years, hunters tracked jaguars through the delta's tangled woods - the big cats the Spanish called tigres, though South America has no true tigers. The animals are long gone, but the name stuck to the place where they were stalked. Europeans first came to farm this floodplain, and in 1820 they founded a town on an island stitched together by small rivers, after floods had swept away earlier settlements in the district then known as the Partido de las Conchas. The river that drowned one settlement created the conditions for another: a port. Fruit and timber from the delta's countless islands, and from the Paraná ports far upstream, were unloaded at Tigre's wharves. More than two centuries later, it remains a working timber port - the wood still comes downriver, as it always has.

Everything changed in 1865, when the railway reached the riverbank. Suddenly the delta was an afternoon's journey from the capital, and Tigre became one of Argentina's first tourist destinations. Wealthy porteños built villas and mansions in the ornate style of the Belle Époque, escaping the summer heat for the cool of the water. The grandest of them, the Tigre Club, once held a casino; today the same building houses the Museo de Arte Tigre and an extensive collection of Argentine painting and sculpture. Two rail lines still end within walking distance of the docks - the Mitre Line and the scenic Tren de la Costa, which traces the shoreline north from Buenos Aires. The trains made Tigre, and they still deliver the crowds each weekend, just as they delivered the first day-trippers a century and a half ago.

Along the Luján and Tigre rivers stands the largest concentration of rowing clubs in South America - a stretch of timber boathouses, verandas, and racing shells that has been proposed for UNESCO World Heritage status. They were built by the immigrant communities who poured into Argentina around 1900: British, French, Belgian, German, Swiss, Scandinavian, Italian, Spanish, and Jewish rowers, each group raising its own clubhouse on the water. Rowing began in Buenos Aires, but by the turn of the century the sport had migrated here, where the calm, sheltered channels were perfect for it. On a clear morning the river fills with the rhythmic dip of oars and the slide of sculls cutting upstream, a sound carried over from England and France and made entirely Argentine.

The old Puerto de Frutos earned its name as the dock where the delta's fruit was landed. The fruit boats have mostly gone, and the riverside warehouses now hold a sprawling craft fair - wicker and cane furniture, homemade jam and honey, antiques, and still, here and there, baskets of local fruit. Restaurants, teahouses, and small lodges line the water; there is even a museum devoted to mate, the bitter green tea Argentines drink through a metal straw. But the real Tigre lies beyond the tourist quarter, out where the channels narrow and the houses stand on stilts above the brown current. Sightseeing launches probe these inner waterways, some running as far as Martín García Island near the Uruguayan shore. To ride one is to understand that out here, the river is not a view. It is the road, the schoolyard, the supply line - the only way through.