Buenos Aires' Liniers stockyards close after 122 years of trading
A full 122 years on from its inauguration, Buenos Aires' traditional Liniers cattle stockyards finally closed its doors on Friday.
With 7,672 animals up for sale, the last auction was held and the bells of the traditional market rang out for the last time.
The bustling stockyards had been slated for closure since 2001, when the City Legislature barred the sale of livestock within city limits.
Delayed by a series of injunctions, an agreement was reached with the city in 2017 for the transfer of the antiquated, 84-acre stockyards to a modern, 270-acre complex near Cañuelas (some 40 miles southwest).
"We would all have preferred to stay here - but it's evident that the place is obsolete," Jorge Longobuco, its manager for the last three decades, admitted. "If we had stayed here we would've had to update it to standards similar to those in Cañuelas."
The city plans to gradually repurpose the land - equal to some 36 city blocks - for parks, schools, public housing and a cultural center that would incorporate the existing headquarters - an 1899 Italianate arcade which houses a museum and serves as the focal point for the Mataderos Fair, a weekly neighborhood staple since 1986.
Mooving on
The Liniers stockyards were inaugurated on March 21, 1900 - when the surrounding Mataderos ward was still a rural outskirt of Buenos Aires and beef was still Argentina's top export earner.
Retired buyer Rafael Andrés, 91, recalls the stockyards' heyday:
“They were trains with hundreds of cars. There was also the pig market, with 12,000 pigs daily; and the sheep market, with 60,000 sheep. They were glory days: all the English slaughterhouses that exported, and 20,000 head of cattle daily.”
In recent decades, an average of around 40,000 cattle were actioned weekly at Liniers to supply beef for the Argentine capital - though since the Covid-pandemic, its activity has been reduced to three days and some 20,000 head per week.
While beef consumption nationally has declined by 40% per person since the 1970s, Argentines still consume more beef per capita than in any other nation: around 118 pounds annually in 2020 (compared to 83 pounds in the U.S. and 17 pounds worldwide).
At: https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/traditional-mercado-de-liniers-cattle-market-closes-after-122-years-of-trading.phtml
The end of an era: An Argentine gaucho looks out over Buenos Aires' Liniers stockyards just before its closure today.
The antiquated stockyards - which has long supplied much of the Buenos Aires beef market - was transferred to a larger, more modern complex some 40 miles southwest of city limits.
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The Liniers stockyards were built near the western end of the city at a time when it was still a few miles outside any built-up areas.
But by the 1920s - just a generation after opening - it was already surrounded by working-class neighborhoods. Traditional one and two-story rowhouses and corner shops common to most Argentine cities even today.
The stockyards, as you can imagine, limited the development of the surrounding areas - one of which became an outright slum partly as a result.
It goes without saying that most of the residents in the Mataderos ward are happy to finally see it go - after 20 years of unjustified injunctions granted to the owners by right-wing, often corrupt judges.
Some of them would've felt right at home with Devin Nunes.
