The first European navigator to visit the beaches and cliffs of what one day would become Mar del Plata was Sir Francis Drake in his 1577 circumnavigation voyage. He introduced the name Cape Lobos in the cartography of his time, due to the large colony of sea lions (lobos de mar in Spanish) around the cape today known as Cabo Corrientes. Just four years later, the Spanish Governor of the River Plate, Don Juan de Garay (second founder of Buenos Aires) explored the area by land, and paid tribute to the beautiful landscape by describing it as a muy galana costa (a very elegant shore). This is today one of the city's favourite mottos.
In 1742, during the War of Jenkins' Ear, eight survivors of , part of Admiral Anson's expedition, lived through a ten-month ordeal before being decimated and captured by the nomadic tribe of the Tehuelches, who eventually handed them to the Spaniards.
In 1746, by order of the Spanish Kingdom, a Jesuit Order's mission was established on the northwestern shore of what is now Laguna de los Padres, some west of the modern city, but it was abandoned after a series of northern Tehuelches attacks, led by native chieftain Cangapol. On 15 November 1770 a punitive expedition departing from Luján and led by Captain Juan Antonio Hernández, with the help of friendly natives, defeated a group of Tehuelches who had been harassing and plundering a number of farms and hamlets beyond the Salado River. The battle took place at the Vulcan Heights, near Sierra de los Padres, where 102 Tehuelches were ambushed and killed. In 1772 another Spanish expedition commanded by Captain Pedro Pablo Pabón surveyed the area. The region was not populated again by Europeans until 1856, when a meat-salting facility was built by Portuguese entrepreneur Coelho de Meirelles, and a stable population settled there.
Foundation and development (1874–1930)
The town was founded on February 10, 1874 by governmental decree, and by initiative of Patricio Peralta Ramos. It is said that Pedro Luro, a Basque merchant, had the idea of turning the growing town into a European-style bathing resort three years later. As the railway began to expand into the province, previously isolated settlements became accessible to visitors from the capital; the first passenger train arrived here from Buenos Aires in September 1886. The subsequent opening of the town's first hotel - the luxurious Bristol Hotel- in 1888 was a great occasion for the Buenos Aires elite, many of whom travelled down for the opening on an overnight train.
The railroad also paved the way to the arrival of European immigrants, mainly Italians, Spaniards and French. Among the Italians, Sicilians and Calabrians started the first fishing activities in the 1890s, although the port of Mar del Plata would only be built in 1916 by a French company. The project was designed and directed by the local engineer Federico Beltrami, son of a Swiss-Italian immigrant, Francesco Beltrami, himself the first recorded builder in the town. Mar del Plata's initial success aside, the richest of Argentina's very rich continued to make their regular pilgrimages to Europe. It took the outbreak of war in Europe to dampen Argentine enthusiasm for the journey across the Atlantic and to establish the town as an exclusive tourist destination. Indeed, the building industry also began in this period, in order to satisfy the demands of the new resort. The different guilds were led mostly by residents originally from Northern Italy, but the next generation included people of Spaniard and Southern Italian stock.
In the late 1920s wealthy Argentine families began to build chalets and mansions near Bristol Hotel, and spent their days at the Playa Bristol beach. They would live in Mar del Plata from November until Easter.
This social background increased the tensions between the elite and the established population. The political intervention of the central power, held by the Conservative Party, in the Municipality's institutions prompted a 1911 Manifiesto from some residents seeking to diminish the national oligarchy influence over local affairs. The following moves brought the Socialists to power in 1919 (see Government in the main article about Mar del Plata), an audacious shift in the summer residence of the Argentine aristocracy. The national Government was also taken over by the Radical Civic Union, its leader, Hipólito Yrigoyen becoming President of the Republic.
Mass tourism (1930–1970)