Buenos Aires: Where is it?
Explaining the difference between CABA, AMBA, and the Province.
Whenever I tell someone I’m living in Argentina, they usually don’t even ask me where. They usually just think that I live in Buenos Aires, the capital. And if they do ask where, and I say I live in Gran Buenos Aires (Greater Buenos Aires), they understand that I live in the capital. I’ll probably sound a bit like someone from New York who doesn’t live in New York City telling you the finer details of the differences between NYC and the rest of the state. There are more similarities than you would think in how the name Buenos Aires works to how the name New York works.
If you look at the map at the top of the screen, you’ll see that the image has Buenos Aires in two places. This post will explain why. Hint, there’s both a city and a province (state-like division) with the name.
So what is CABA?
First, we’re going to talk about the capital city that everyone has heard about. Its formal name is the Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, often shortened to CABA, Bs As, or simply Capital (CABA in this blog). Did you see that term autónoma in the name and assume that meant autonomous as in self-governing? You got that right. It doesn’t belong to a province, Argentina’s state-level political subdivision.
In this sense, CABA is more like Washington D.C. than New York. And like DC, it’s where all the national government activity and buildings are centered. But like New York, it’s very population dense, it’s a huge cultural center, and has many tourist attractions. It’s even split into barrios, like New York City’s split into boroughs. These barrios are shown in the picture, and as you can tell, Provincia de Buenos Aires surrounds it. Next we’ll talk about the province and then last we’ll talk about its metroplex.
Provincia de Buenos Aires
Argentina is a large country and this province is its largest province with the largest share of population. This is primarily due to the metroplex of CABA being under its governance. It has beaches, it has mountains, it has pampas (grasslands). With another similarity to New York, the capital of the province of Buenos Aires isn’t the city of Buenos Aires, but another city actually within its jurisdiction, La Plata. Next we’ll talk about the metroplex referenced to in the picture by one of its many names: the conurbano.
The Metroplex, also known as: el Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires, Gran Buenos Aires, or el conurbano
Yes, the metroplex has many names. We in the metroplex generally prefer to be called the Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires (AMBA) or Gran Buenos Aires (GBA, where in English the G can stand for Greater) as a whole. There are also 3 “zones” of the AMBA: North, West, and South (as CABA lies to the East). I live in the Western Zone (Zona Oeste), the more “middle-class” zone. The Nortern Zone (Zona Norte) is the generally wealthier region. The Southern Zone (Zona Sur) is the generally poorer region.
All these regions have some access to CABA via public transportation. Many people here work in CABA. Whatever happens in CABA is felt here, in spite of our different state-level governments. A dynamic emphasized by the pandemic.
Being so close to CABA while technically being outside of it has weird effects. Especially for official documents. For example, you’ll go to CABA to get your residence, but you’ll go to a local Federal court to get citizenship. Outside of AMBA, for residence, you’d go to the nearest migrations delegation.
Another quick note: As you can see in the pictures, sometimes the municipalities that are in the AMBA are debated. I believe that sometimes the ones in the gray are sometimes included, but often not. I don’t live in one of those, though, so I can’t say for sure.
Anyway, hope this helped to clear up what I mean by CABA, AMBA, and the Province of Buenos Aires. I’ll be using these three terms throughout the blog, so I figured I should write about it early so people are clear on what exactly I am talking about : )
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