Argentina

Argentina is a country in southern South America. It ranks second in land area in South America, and eighth in the world. more...

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Argentina occupies a continental surface area of 2,791,810 km² (1,078,000 sq mi) between the Andes mountain range in the west and the southern Atlantic Ocean in the east and south. It is bordered by Paraguay and Bolivia in the north, Brazil and Uruguay in the northeast, and Chile in the west and south. The country claims the British overseas territories of the Falkland Islands (Spanish: Islas Malvinas) and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. Under the name of Argentine Antarctica, it claims 969,464 km² (374,312 sq mi) of Antarctica, overlapping other claims made by Chile and the United Kingdom.

The country is formally called the Argentine Republic (Spanish: República Argentina, IPA ). For many legal purposes, Nación Argentina (Argentine Nation) is used.

Origin and history of the name

The name Argentina derives from the Latin argentum (silver). When the first Spanish conquistadors discovered the Río de la Plata, they named the estuary Mar Dulce ('Sweet Sea', as in a fresh water sea). Indigenous people gave gifts of silver to the survivors of the shipwrecked expedition, who were led by Juan Díaz de Solís. The legend of Sierra del Plata — a mountain rich in silver — reached Spain around 1524, and the name was first seen in print on a Venice map from 1536. The source of the silver was the area where the city of Potosí was to be founded in 1546. An expedition that followed the trail of the silver up the Paraná and Pilcomayo rivers finally reached the source only to find it already claimed by explorers who reached it from Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty.

The name Argentina was first used extensively in Ruy Díaz de Guzmán's 1612 book Historia del descubrimiento, población, y conquista del Río de la Plata (History of the discovery, population, and conquest of the Río de la Plata), naming the territory Tierra Argentina (Land of Silver).

History

The first signs of human presence in Argentina are located in the Patagonia ( Piedra Museo, Santa Cruz), and date from 11,000 BC. Around 1 AD, several corn-based civilizations developed in the western Andean region (Santa María, Huarpes, Diaguitas, Sanavirones, among others). In 1480 the Inca Empire, under the rule of emperor Pachacutec, launched an offensive and conquered present-day northwestern Argentina, integrating it into a region called Collasuyu. In the northeastern area, the Guaraní developed a culture based on yuca and sweet potato. The central and southern areas (Pampas and Patagonia) were dominated by nomadic cultures, unified in the 17th century by the Mapuches.

Read more at Wikipedia.org