by Ana O'Reilly

Created on: September 02, 2009   Last Updated: October 21, 2009

Argentina is a lot more than tango and soccer. It would be impossible to unravel all its complexities in just one short article; this is just the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully, it will be enough to whet the reader's appetite for more.

* Contrary to popular belief, the capital city of Argentina is not Rio de Janeiro but Buenos Aires, or Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires, as it is officially called.

* Argentina is the eighth biggest country in the world and the second largest country in South America.

* According to the latest census, the ethnic composition is the following: 85% white, 10% mestizo (mixed Amerindian and white), Amerindians and others 5%.

* The unofficial national drink is mate, a sort of bitter green tea served in a gourd drunk through a metal straw called bombilla.

* A land abundant in natural beauty, Argentina boasts the highest peak in the Americas and the widest waterfalls in the world, Iguazu Falls. Cerro Aconcagua is 6,962 metres (22,841 ft) high and is the highest mountain outside Asia as well. It is located in the Andes mountain range, in the province of Mendoza.

* Argentina is a world leader in setting voluntary greenhouse gas targets.

* The five Argentinean Nobel Prize winners are:

1. Bernardo Houssay, for Physiology or Medicine in 1947. He was the first Argentine and Latin American Nobel laureate in the Sciences.

2. Luis Federico Leloir, for Chemistry in 1970.

3. Cesar Milstein shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984.

4. Adolfo Perez Esquivel, for Peace in 1980.

5. Carlos Saavedra Lamas, for Peace in 1936. He was the first Latin American Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

* Argentina has produced her fair share of inventions used around the world on a daily basis. For example, Laszlo Biro, the Hungarian inventor of the ballpoint pen, moved to Argentina from Hungary and on June 10, 1943 filed another patent and formed Biro Pens of Argentina (in fact, in Argentina the ball pen is known as birome). Laszlo Biro died in Buenos Aires in 1985.

* Argentina's Inventor's Day is celebrated on Biro's birthday, September 29.

* Another invention or, rather, an improvement on an existing discovery was that devised by Juan Vucetich, a Croatian-born Argentine anthropologist and police officer who pioneered the use of fingerprinting. In 1891 Vucetich began the first filing of fingerprints based on the ideas of Francis Galton which he expanded significantly and in 1892, Vucetich made the first positive identification of a killer. Argentine

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