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Map of La Plata
Few cities were drawn in one go and with so much geometry. La Plata, capital of Buenos Aires province, is a perfect square crossed by diagonals, and in a line drawing it looks like a piece of graphic design.
What you see on the map
The square. The city was founded in 1882 on the plan of engineer Pedro Benoit: a square about five kilometres a side, ringed by a circuit avenue, with a grid of numbered streets inside.
The diagonals. Two great diagonal avenues cross the square corner to corner, and shorter ones link squares to each other. They are what makes the map unique: a grid crossed by Xs.
The squares. Every six blocks, a wider avenue, and at its crossings, a square: a regular rhythm of green clearings that reads across the whole map.
The monumental axis. A strip of public buildings and parks runs through the centre, from Plaza Moreno, with the cathedral, to Plaza San Martín and the government house, up to the Paseo del Bosque, a large park in the north-east corner.
Which scale and paper suit it
1:28,000 on a 30 cm square, as in the picture, covers 7.8 km: the whole founding city, with the circuit avenue as a frame. The city is drawn as blocks, here with their outline.
1:12,000 on A3 moves in on the centre, with the cathedral, the monumental axis and the first diagonals.
A 50 × 70 poster at 1:40,000 adds the surroundings: the port, Ensenada and the shore of the Río de la Plata.
Make it yours
Open the example and move the frame: the Paseo del Bosque, with the museum and the lake, or nearby Buenos Aires, with its grid of hundred-metre blocks, deserve a map of their own.
Change all the colours at once with a theme (black ink, sepia, coral, night, blueprint) and download it as PNG. With a free account, also element by element, at 600 dpi, as vector PDF and as SVG.
