Villa Gesell is a seaside town in Villa Gesell Partido, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina.
History
The town gets its name from Don Carlos Gesell, the son of German economist Silvio Gesell. In 1931 he bought 16.48 square kilometres of sand dunes on the Atlantic coast of Argentina. In that year he built a house for his family, this has now been converted into the Gesell family museum. Carlos Gesell transformed the sand dunes by planting thousands of trees there. The settlement gradually expanded stretching along the coastline, and today continues its growth by annexing three more cities to the south, namely, Mar de las Pampas, Las Gaviotas and Mar Azul. Villa Gesell has been a popular tourist destination since the 1940s. In January 1952 the town was visited by Ernesto Che Guevara as he set out on his journey across Latin America immortalized in The Motorcycle Diaries.
External links
- Official site [in Spanish]
