Friday, July 3rd 2026 - 07:47 UTC
Hundreds of residents and tourists took to the streets to photograph the beaches, squares and parks turned white, and the images quickly went viral on social media
The seaside city of Mar del Plata, one of the main tourist destinations on Argentina's Atlantic coast, woke up covered in snow on Thursday, an unusual sight for a temperate-climate city that became the most widely shared image of the intense polar cold wave sweeping the country. Thermometers read around 1 degree below zero, with a wind-chill close to -3 °C, and snow and sleet were recorded from the early hours in various parts of the General Pueyrredón district, with heavier accumulation in the Sierra de los Padres area.
Hundreds of residents and tourists took to the streets to photograph the beaches, squares and parks turned white, and the images quickly went viral on social media. It was an exceptional phenomenon: snow had not covered the city in this way for more than a decade. Historical records of snowfall in Mar del Plata are scarce and isolated; among the most remembered are the major snowfall of August 1, 1991 —the most intense, with accumulations of more than 20 centimeters— and later, shorter episodes in 2004 and 2007.
