c.1970 train station. After a series of exploratory expeditions from
Chile starting in 1543,
Santiago del Estero del Nuevo Maestrazgo was founded on July 25, 1553, by
Francisco de Aguirre (although some historians consider its true foundation to be in 1550). Although it is the oldest city in Argentina, it preserves little of its former
Spanish colonial architecture, except for several churches. In 1576, the governor of a province in northern Argentina commissioned the military to search for a huge mass of iron, which he had heard that Natives used for their weapons. They called the area "Heavenly Fields," translated into Spanish as
Campo del Cielo. (This term now refers to a protected area situated on the boundary between the provinces of
Chaco and Santiago del Estero, where a group of
iron meteorites were found, estimated as having fallen in a
Holocene impact event some 4,000–5,000 years ago. In 2015, Police arrested four alleged smugglers trying to steal more than a ton of protected meteorites.) The city was the capital of the Intendency of San Miguel de Tucumán during the
Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, and first seat of its bishop; those were later moved to
Salta and
Córdoba respectively. Santiago del Estero stands in the middle of an extensive but largely semi-arid agricultural region. Originally a
dry forest area, the abundance of
quebracho attracted timber industries of
British capital during the 19th century, leading to extensive deforestation; the British-owned
Central Argentine Railway reached the city in 1884. The province, in 1948, elected a young
Peronist activist,
Carlos Arturo Juárez, as its Governor. Santiago del Estero's central political figure during the second half of the 20th century, he soon became indispensable to local politics (even out of power). A true
Caudillo (strongman), his amiable demeanor belied a record of ruthlessness towards opposition figures. The construction of the nearby Quiroga Dam (on the
Río Dulce) in 1950, eased the city's chronic water shortage and spurred the growth of local agriculture, based on
cotton and
olives. The city's first school of higher education, the
Instituto Superior del Profesorado (a
normal school), was established in 1953. The city developed a sizable manufacturing sector based on
textile mills and other
light industry from the 1950s on, though the public sector remained the largest employer. Santiago del Estero's population reached 100,000 in 1970. Juárez, by the 1990s, was readily ordering his opponents' deaths, notably that of former Governor César Iturre in 1996 and of Bishop Gerardo Sueldo in 1998. The 2002 deaths of two local women, however, were traced to Juárez's assassin, Antonio Musa Azar, and in an attempt to retain power, Juárez resigned (appointing his wife,
Nina Juárez, governor). The bid failed, however, as President
Néstor Kirchner signed an executive order removing Mrs. Juárez from her post in March 2004. The Juárez couple, in their nineties, subsequently lived under house arrest in the city of Santiago del Estero; the former strongman died in 2010. ==Transport==