With the declaration of Buenos Aires as Federal Capital in 1880, the province of Buenos Aires - already by far the wealthiest and most powerful in the republic - was left without a centre of government. In 1881, the province's newly named governor, Dardo Rocha , a Porteño lawyer by profession, proposed that a new provincial capital be created in the vicinity of Ensenada, some thirty miles east of the federal capital. The new city's layout, based on rationalist concepts and characterized by an absolutely regular numbered street plan sitting within a five-kilometre square, was designed by the engineer and surveyor Pedro Benoit. An international competition was held to choose designs for the most important public buildings and the winning architects included Germans and Italians as well as Argentinians, a mix of nationalities reflected in the city's impressive civic architecture.

The country's first entirely planned city, La Plata was officially founded on November 19, 1882. Electric street lighting was installed in 1884 - it was the first city in Latin America to do so. The grand ambitions held for the new provincial capital can be gauged by the local writer José María Lunazzi's comment, made soon after the city's founding, that La Plata was the "Athens of America". Unfortunately, though, much of La Plata's carefully conceived architectural identity was lost during the twentieth century, as anonymous modern constructions replaced many of the city's original buildings. A particularly sad example was the loss of the grand Italianate Teatro Argentino , second in national importance after Buenos Aires' Teatro Colón, razed to the ground after a suspect fire in the 1970s and rebuilt as a massive octagonal concrete monolith. Nonetheless, enough of the city's original features remain for it to have made a recent serious bid to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Whether or not the bid is successful, the project will at least have had the positive effect of encouraging the preservation of the city's remaining architectural heritage - a symptom of this changing attitude is the recent completion of the city's imposing Gothic cathedral, over a hundred years after its foundation stone was laid.

La Plata was essentially conceived of as an administrative centre , and one might argue that it shows: indeed for many Argentinians the city is little more than a place you visit in order to carry out the dreaded and complicated trámites , bureaucratic procedures in which Argentinian public bodies seem to specialize. In terms of identity, the city suffers somewhat through its proximity to Buenos Aires, whose seemingly endless sprawl now laps at the outskirts of La Plata, practically turning the city which was created as a counterbalance to the capital into its suburb. La Plata is also an important university town : The city's first university, the Universidad de la Plata - founded in 1897 - was nationalized in 1905 and today the city's three universities - the Universidad Nacional de la Plata, the Universidad Católica de la Plata and Universidad Argentina de Abogacía (University of Law) attract students from all over the country.

La Plata's chief attractions are its pleasant city centre park, the Paseo del Bosque and - even though it is struggling to live up to its self-proclaimed reputation as one of the world's major natural history museums - the Museo de Ciencias Naturales .