The most famous people from Argentina are the independence general José de San Martín, who freed Chile and Peru from Spanish rule; Eva "Evita" Perón, the first lady who championed women's right to vote; the writer Jorge Luis Borges, author of Ficciones; the revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, born in Rosario; Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas; the tango composer Astor Piazzolla; and the footballers Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi, who captained Argentina to World Cup wins in 1986 and 2022. The founders come first below, because the country's streets, squares and national holidays still honour them, followed by the writers, scientists, a pope and the athletes who took the name "Argentina" around the world.
San Martín and Belgrano: The Generals of 1810 to 1822
José de San Martín (c. 1778–1850) was born in Yapeyú, a former Jesuit mission for the Guaraní people in Corrientes province; the exact year is disputed because no birth record survives. He left the Río de la Plata at the age of seven to study in Málaga and served in the Spanish army before returning in 1812 to join the independence cause. From Cuyo, the wine country around Mendoza, he raised the Army of the Andes, led it over the mountains into Chile and won the battles of Chacabuco (1817) and Maipú (1818). He then sailed north to Lima, where he was named Protector of Peru on 12 July 1821. After a closed-door meeting with Simón Bolívar at Guayaquil in July 1822 he resigned his command, left politics and in 1824 moved to France, where he died in 1850. He is still known as "the Liberator of Argentina, Chile and Peru" and is regarded as a national hero in all three countries.
Manuel Belgrano (1770–1820) was born in Buenos Aires, the son of an Italian merchant, and trained as a lawyer and economist before the May Revolution of 1810 made him a general. While fortifying the Paraná River near Rosario in 1812, he designed a blue-and-white flag and raised it on 27 February on an island opposite the town. The ruling triumvirate did not approve it at first, but his design became the national flag. He died of dropsy on 20 June 1820, and that date has been Argentina's Flag Day since 1938.
The memorial on the Rosario riverfront hosts the main Flag Day ceremony each year. The story of the stripes and the Sun of May is told in our guide to the meaning and history of Argentina's flag.
Sarmiento and Yrigoyen: Schools and the Secret Ballot
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–1888) was born in Carrascal, a poor suburb of San Juan in the Andean west. Forced into exile in Chile under the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, he wrote Facundo (1845) there, a portrait of the provincial strongman Facundo Quiroga that framed Argentine politics as a contest between "civilisation" and "barbarism". As president from 1868 to 1874 he built schools and trained teachers so that some 100,000 children could attend school, championed education for girls as well as boys, and strung about 5,000 kilometres of telegraph line across the country.
Hipólito Yrigoyen (1852–1933) of the Radical Civic Union campaigned for decades for honest elections. His pressure produced the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912, which introduced the secret ballot and compulsory voting for men, and in 1916 he became the first president chosen under it. He served from 1916 to 1922 and again from 1928 until the military coup of 1930, the first of several that interrupted Argentine democracy in the twentieth century.
Juan and Eva Perón: The Casa Rosada, 1946 to 1974
Juan Perón (1895–1974), an army officer, built a movement on labour unions and welfare policy after taking part in the 1943 military revolution and becoming its minister of labour. He was elected president in 1946, re-elected in 1951, overthrown in 1955 and returned from exile to win a third time in 1973, dying in office the following year. He remains the only Argentine president elected three times, and the political movement named after him, Peronism, still shapes the country's elections.
Eva Perón (1919–1952), known as Evita, was born into poverty in Los Toldos, a village in the Pampas, and moved to Buenos Aires at 15 to work as an actress. As first lady from 1946 she ran the Eva Perón Foundation, which built homes and hospitals, and she campaigned for Law 13,010, passed on 9 September 1947, which gave women equal political rights and the vote. She then founded the Female Peronist Party, the country's first large women's party. Opposition from the military and her failing health forced her to abandon a bid for the vice-presidency in 1951, and she died of cancer in July 1952 at the age of 33.
Borges, Cortázar, Piazzolla and Mercedes Sosa: Argentina on Paper and on Stage
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was born in Buenos Aires and wrote the two story collections that made him known worldwide, Ficciones and El Aleph, in the 1940s. Their labyrinths, mirrors and infinite libraries influenced writers across Latin America and Europe. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library in Buenos Aires, although by then he was losing his sight, and he was completely blind by 55.
Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) was born in Ixelles, Brussels, to Argentine parents and spent most of his childhood in Banfield, a suburb south of Buenos Aires, before settling in France in 1951. His novel Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), which can be read in more than one order, made him one of the leading writers of the Latin American "Boom". Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992), born in Mar del Plata to Italian-descended parents, played the bandoneon and turned tango into concert music, a style called nuevo tango; he wrote "Adiós Nonino" in New York in 1959 in memory of his father, Vicente "Nonino" Piazzolla. Mercedes Sosa (1935–2009), born in San Miguel de Tucumán, sang the folk songs of the Andean north-west to audiences throughout Latin America and won the Premio Gardel, Argentina's main music award, in 2000.
Five Nobel Prizes, from Saavedra Lamas in 1936 to Milstein in 1984
Argentina has produced five Nobel laureates. Carlos Saavedra Lamas (1878–1959), foreign minister from 1932 to 1938, helped mediate an end to the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay and received the 1936 Nobel Peace Prize, the first awarded to a Latin American. Bernardo Houssay (1887–1971), a Buenos Aires physiologist, shared the 1947 prize in Physiology or Medicine for showing how pituitary hormones regulate blood sugar, the first Latin American Nobel in the sciences. Luis Federico Leloir (1906–1987) was born in Paris while his Argentine parents were there for his father's medical treatment, and was educated at the University of Buenos Aires; he received the 1970 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering how the body builds and breaks down carbohydrates.
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (born 1931), a sculptor and human rights organiser, was detained without trial for 14 months under the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 and received the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent opposition to it. César Milstein (1927–2002), born in Bahía Blanca to a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant father, shared the 1984 prize in Physiology or Medicine for the hybridoma technique that produces monoclonal antibodies, now used in diagnostic tests and cancer drugs.
Che Guevara and Jorge Bergoglio: Rosario and Flores to the World
Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928–1967) was born in Rosario and completed his medical degree in Argentina in June 1953. His nickname comes from che, an Argentine filler word he used so often that it stuck while he was travelling through Central America. He became a commander in Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba and later led guerrilla campaigns in Congo and Bolivia, where he was captured and executed in 1967. His life remains deeply divisive, but Alberto Korda's photograph of him, Guerrillero Heroico, has been called the most famous photograph in the world.
Pope Francis (1936–2025) was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Flores, a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, the eldest of five children of an Italian immigrant. He joined the Jesuits in 1958, became archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and was made a cardinal in 2001. Elected pope on 13 March 2013, he was the first Jesuit pope, the first from Latin America and the first born outside Europe since the eighth century. He led the Catholic Church until his death on 21 April 2025.
Fangio, Maradona, Messi, Sabatini and Ginóbili: Argentina in Sport
Juan Manuel Fangio (1911–1995) was born in Balcarce, near Mar del Plata, and won the Formula One world championship five times in the 1950s; at his retirement he held the records for wins, pole positions and fastest laps. Diego Maradona (1960–2020) was born in Lanús and raised in Villa Fiorito, a shantytown south of Buenos Aires. He captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, winning the Golden Ball, and in the quarter-final against England scored both the "Hand of God" goal and a solo run past five players later voted the Goal of the Century.
Lionel Messi (born 1987) was born in Rosario and moved with his family to Barcelona in February 2001, aged 13. He won a record eight Ballon d'Or awards, led Argentina to the 2021 and 2024 Copa América titles, and captained the side to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, becoming the first player to win the tournament's Golden Ball twice. At the 2026 World Cup he led Argentina to a second consecutive final. Gabriela Sabatini (born 1970) won the 1990 US Open singles title and reached world number three, and Manu Ginóbili (born 1977) won four NBA championships with the San Antonio Spurs and led Argentina to basketball gold at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
Many of these lives run through the capital, from Belgrano's birthplace to Borges's library and Bergoglio's parish in Flores; our profile of Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina covers the city where so many of them were born and worked.