Region - Pampa
rgentinean Pampas, vast plain very occasionally interrupted by timid mountains. Overpopulated and solitary, in forest green and cement grey. Fertile land where hopes are grown every day.
Urban and cosmopolitan at the city of Buenos Aires. Concrete hardened and transited by thousands of vehicles, dozens of bus lines and several railroads. Under the asphalt a subway with some lines plays at joining some Buenos Aires neighborhoods. While from the air a plane discovers roofs and paints postcards of Río de la Plata.
City revived with green thanks to a square, a park or a nature reserve.
Five minutes from the feverish downtown, and far from the madding crowd, the Costanera Sur Ecological Reserve provides a necessary share of biodiversity. In its magnificent wetlands, lagoons, grasslands and forests, countless animal species coexist. More than three hundred types of birds, in addition to several species of mammals, reptiles and insects stand there against the relentless property raid. Across the General Paz Avenue and the Riachuelo brook, already in the Province of Buenos Aires, the metropolis is still taming the plain. Although in Morón, west of Greater Buenos Aires, the land gives a green neigh in the form of lush foliage of native trees. Some Vachelia caven (Acacia caven), ombú trees (Phytolacca dioica), pepper trees and talas (Celtis tala) form another urban nature reserve, a fondness for various animals such as weasels and chimangos caracara, among others. It lets remind new generations how the region looked before becoming a major urban core.
In Otamendi Nature Reserve, just 73 kilometers north of Buenos Aires Obelisk, the undulating Pampas of the gaucho is intertwined with the physiognomy of the Paraná River Delta: 2600 protected hectares with high pastures and seed-eating birds to name just some of its inhabitants. While to the south, in Campos del Tuyú National Park—located 293 kilometers from the city of Buenos Aires—, Pampas, ocean and estuary converge to generate an area of high biodiversity. There, the endangered Pampas deer has its deserved haven of peace.
While in the province of Córdoba, always as a kind of gauchada (a helping hand), a rocky ravine becomes a condor nest. In Quebrada del Condorito, thanks to thermal air currents generated, the bird begins to learn its heroic job of sentinel of the high peaks.
Gaucho’s Pampas, the rough one from Martín Fierro. But also the one that, as the writer Ricardo Güiraldes portraits in Don Segundo Sombra, sometimes offers us “an opening in the sky and a sunbeam falling on the field and running to become brittle in the mountains, get lost in the hollows, perch on the hillocks”. Water, sun and fertile land. For good measure, illusions.
Author: Fernando Fuentes