Villa Gesell

Villa Gesell (actually Villa Silvio Gesell) is a seaside resort in Argentina, located in the province of Buenos Aires. The city on the coast of the South Atlantic is the administrative center of the homonymous Partidos and has about 20,000 permanent residents.

Name

The name translates as company town and goes back to Silvio Gesell, the father of the town's founder, Carlos Gesell. Commonly, however, today is the abbreviated name of Villa Gesell.

History

Carlos Gesell, who ran a pram factory together with his brother in Argentina, learned in 1931 that north of Mar del Plata a ten- kilometer long and 1600 meters wide coastal strip was for sale. The price was extremely low, because wandering dunes and shifting sands dominated the tubular area. Carlos Gesell had recently visited the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend and put thrilled a certain similarity of landscape conditions fixed.

As a child and teenager he had met through the eventful life of his father Silvio Gesell various forms of human coexistence, including a rural commune in Switzerland as well as shaped by vegetarianism and Lebensreform ideas colony Eden at Oranienburg. Impulses, which he had received there led to his life-long dream to realize an alternative working and living community in Argentina. The coastline on the Atlantic seemed to offer the right conditions for it.

In the spring of 1932, Carlos Gesell began against the resistance of his brother with the cultivation of the dunes. He built a wooden house and tried to plant in the dunes pine and acacia trees. A massive sandstorm buried these beginnings.

Company sought advice in Germany. An agricultural engineer who had successfully carried out on the East Frisian Islands afforestation, advised him. But also another planting attempt failed. Company returned to Germany and fell out with his brother. He had to pay off his capital share and developed a new plan to replant the dunes of the coastal region. He bought beach oats in Germany and planted him after his return initially on a trial field. First successes came on. The dune landscape gained stability. He tried again in connection to plant trees - with success. The dunes were stabilized. This commitment was wearing a Carlos Gesell nicknamed Crazy of the dunes.

The constant shortage of money forced companies to look for new revenue. He tried it with a pig and goat breeding - without success. When in 1940 some of the offshore anglers from Buenos Aires accidentally landed on its coast, and there discovered the very great abundance of fish, companies developed the idea to open his land for tourism. He built a road parallel to the coast, Bulevar Silvio Gesell, today's main shopping street and Villa Gesell. In 1941 became the first guest house, Pension summer swallow, built. In a newspaper advertisement Carlos successfully campaigned for his paradise of solitude and called it Villa Silvio Gesell.

This was followed by first settlers who leased land and built houses on it. Businesses originated and a school was established. the teacher paid Carlos Gesell out of pocket.

In the 50s of the 20th century Villa Gesell was connected to the Argentine transport network. In the village there was no smoking. Alcohol was allowed only on feast days and gambling generally prohibited.

In the 60s of the 20th century, artists discovered Villa Gesell. Painters, musicians, photographers dominated the townscape. A jetty that extends far out into the sea, was built. The city was built in the 1960s and 1970s primarily among campers and young people popular until more and more hotels and places of entertainment was held and thus the mass tourism feeder.

Carlos Gesell died 1977. 1971 he was awarded by the German President Gustav Heinemann with the Federal Cross of Merit.

Villa Gesell today

Many descendants still live Gesell Villa Gesell. A granddaughter operates, inter alia, there a campsite. A museum that has its place in the building built by Carlos Gesell first residential home, Casa Gesell, reminiscent of the city's founder.

Each season, about 750,000 tourists visit the city, it is therefore one of the main tourist centers of Argentina.