Descriptive Essay on a Place
Descriptive essay of the Río de la Plata
The Río de la Plata or, in more technical terms, the estuary of La Plata, is one of the main arteries of the Argentine territory, whose saline waters gave meaning to the founding, in the 16th century, of the city of Buenos Aires: a port of departure to Spain for the precious minerals extracted in Upper Peru. This is where the name of its waters comes from and not from its coloration, which tends rather to bronze.
The 290 kilometers long Río de la Plata extends in a northwest-southeast direction, marking the border between Argentina and Uruguay, from the parallel of Punta Gorda to the imaginary line that joins Punta del Este (in Uruguay) with Cape San Antonio (in Argentina), prior to its mouth in the Atlantic Ocean.
It is also the widest river in the world: 234 km at its maximum point, with an average depth of 13 meters, which requires continuous dredging of the current’s sedimentary deposits. Some 160 million tons of sediment are moved each year: silt, clay and sand, since otherwise they would impede the intense commercial life that the river provides to the many ports that have been founded on its shore: Colonia de Sacramento, Piriápolis, La Plata, Punta del Este, Puerto de Olivos, Puerto del Buceo, those of Montevideo and Buenos Aires.
The Spanish are said to have first reached this river around 1501, during the first of Américo Vespucci’s voyages to the continent that would bear his name; and which initially received the biblical name of Jordan. But this, if true, did not prevent it from being known as the Sweet Sea more than a decade later, in the words of one of the main Spanish explorers in the region, Juan Díaz de Solís, who was trying to find an exit to the ocean. Peaceful. Since then, this river has been targeted by many different powers, from the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, to the British invaders who tried to seize the Viceroyalty of La Plata in 1806.
In fact, many naval battles took place on this river, such as the Battle of the Río de la Plata in 1939, during World War II: the first confrontation between English and German ships of the conflict. And, likewise, there have been many shipwrecks that have occurred in its waters, difficult to navigate and weather prone to storms. The southeastern ones that occur in the region are famous: cold and strong winds that blow from the southeast and are accompanied by heavy rains, causing the river to grow around 4 meters high.
A tiny group of islands exists in the heart of the estuary: sedimentary splashes that immortalize the name of Solís and belong to Argentina. Not far from there emerges a larger spot, a few square kilometers in area. A body of land split in two, like Siamese twins in the middle of the water: the Martín García (Argentina) and Timoteo Domínguez (Uruguay) islands, which in reality constitute only one, and in the middle of both is the only dry border between the two countries.
The shores of the river, for their part, belong not only to these two different countries (which from a certain point of view are not so different), but to two opposing geological formations. The eastern border, in Uruguayan territory, is part of the Brasilia Massif, and is fed by the tributaries of San Juan, Rosario, Santa Lucía and the Solís Grande stream.
The opposite side, on the other hand, is part of the Pampa sedimentary basin, formed by silt plateaus and muddy plains, where reeds abound. Two large tributaries meet there: the Samborombón and the Salado, and both flow into the Samborombón Bay, on the coast of the Province of Buenos Aires.
And although the river is a common ground for tourism and water sports such as kitesurfing, windsurfing or kayaking, the Río de la Plata presents strong margins of contamination, especially in areas close to Buenos Aires. In part, this is due to the fact that the Reconquista River, highly polluted, and especially the Matanza-Riachuelo River die in its waters: one of the most polluted in the world, which rises in the province of Buenos Aires and delimits the south of the Argentine capital.
Five centu reunification impossible.
References:
- “What is a descriptive essay?” in The Thinker.
- “Essay” on Wikipedia.
- “River Plate” on Wikipedia.
- “River of the Silver” in Conicet Mendoza (Argentina).
- “Río de la Plata, a strategic point in the geography of our country” in Edu.ar.
What is a descriptive essay?
A descriptive essay is a type of essay text (that is, a reflection written in prose) that is characterized by addressing a specific topic (a place, a person, an event or an object) and describing it exhaustively, that is, highlighting its features or most outstanding or relevant characteristics for the author. However, as in all essays, in this type of text the subjectivity of the essayist is key to defining which are the most outstanding characteristics or which is the perspective from which the theme or the chosen referent will be described.
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