Mendoza's colony, named Ciudad de Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre, struggled against hostile indigenous groups and starvation, and was abandoned within five years. The city would be permanently refounded in 1580 by Juan de Garay, but Mendoza's initial landing marks the earliest European claim on what became Argentina's capital.
Pedro de Mendoza arrived with a fleet of eleven ships and roughly 1,500 settlers and soldiers, one of the largest Spanish expeditions yet sent to South America, seeking a foothold near the silver-rich interior that gave the river its name, the Río de la Plata.
The settlement's fortunes collapsed almost immediately. Conflict with the Querandí people, crop failures, and disease reduced the colonists to desperate hunger; chroniclers recorded that starving settlers resorted to eating shoe leather and, in the grimmest accounts, the bodies of the executed. Mendoza himself, already dying of syphilis, sailed back toward Spain and died at sea in 1537.
The survivors eventually abandoned the site and relocated to Asunción. It would take Juan de Garay's 1580 expedition to establish a lasting settlement, but Argentine historical memory still credits Mendoza's ill-fated 1536 landing as the symbolic birth of Buenos Aires.
Key people: Pedro de Mendoza