Residents of Nordelta, Argentina’s most famous and arguably most beautiful gated community, have been battling hordes of capybaras, giant, adorable rodents that act like they own the place because technically they do…

A 1,500ha suburban development built on the wetlands of the Paraná, the second most important river in South America after the Amazon, Nordelta is home to some 40,000 people, many of whom paid a premium to own a home in what is a stunning location. Positioned just north of Buenos Aires, among picturesque lakes and streams. Nordelta is one of the most coveted places to own a home, but also one of the most contested by environmentalists, who contest its reason for existing. That’s because the wetlands it was built on were the home of various species of plants and animals, including capybaras, who have now returned to reclaim their rightful place.

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The Salar de Arizaro, Argentina’s second largest salt flat, is home to one of the world’s most mysterious natural formations – Cono de Arita, a 200-meter-tall conical pyramid that’s so perfectly shaped that it appears man-made.

In fact, all through the early twentieth century, everyone was convinced that Cono de Arita, like the actual pyramids of Egypt, had been built my man. However, scientific research has since showed that this imposing formation is actually the tip of a small volcano that lacked the power to burst through the Earth’s curst and spew lava or develop a crater. Today it is considered the most perfect natural cone in the world.

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Héctor Aníbal Gimenez, better known as “Pastor Gimenez” in Argentina, was recently accused of trying to profit off of the global coronavirus pandemic by trying to sell “Blessed antibacterial gel” to his followers.

The Argentine evangelical pastor was denounced last Wednesday before prosecutor Matías Michienzi by a lawyer who said that the antibacterial gel was being offered at the Temple of Waves of Love and Peace, located in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Almagro. The complaint mentioned that the bottles of of gel were also sold on the church’s Facebook page where they were being promoted as blessed by Pastor Gimenez to provide protection against the novel coronavirus.

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Sheila, a Golden retriever mix from Buenos Aires, Argentina, has melted the hearts of millions around South America after it was reported that she has been patiently waiting outside a local police station ever since her owner was arrested there, over a year ago.

The loyal dog reportedly showed up outside the police station in 25 de Mayo, a small town in Argentina’s Buenos Aires province, soon after her owner was brought in on charges of assault, last year. Staff there believe that she must have followed the patrol her owner was in, but one thing is for sure, once she arrived, she never left. It didn’t take long for the officers to notice her presence, and some of them started bringing her food to gain her trust. Sheila was cautious at first, but today she depends on the policemen for sustenance, sleeps inside the station at night, and sometimes accompanies her carers on patrols. But she always comes back to the station to wait for her master.

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An Argentinian local court ordered a 70-year-old man to pay his ex-wife 8 million pesos ($173,000) as compensation for 27 years of house work.

Judge Victoria Famá made the landmark ruling after taking into consideration that the elderly couple’s roles had been well-determined during their 30-year marriage, with the woman, identified only as M.L., taking care of the household, while the husband went to work. Despite holding a degree in economics, the woman put aside her professional career to raise her children and take care of the house. By the time M.L.’s husband left her, she was already 60-years-old, too old to even be considered on the job market.

“After 27 years of marriage the accused abandoned his wife when she turned 60 years old, the age at which women obtain retirement benefits, being excluded from the labour market,” Judge Famá’s ruling stated. “The economic dependence of wives on their husbands is one of the central mechanisms through which women are subordinated in society.”

The Argentinian couple separated in 2009, and divorced two years later. Since then, the woman has experienced financial difficulties due to her inability to find a job and receiving meager retirement benefits, while her husband reportedly “lived a good life”.

“This verdict is very novel because it acknowledges that what we do in our homes is a job, care tasks are a job because they involve time, effort and skills,” Lucia Martelotte, deputy executive director of the Latin American Justice and Gender Team, said. “But this goes unseen and women do not get a salary for that.”

Judge Famá described the compensation amount as “a reasonable sum in order to balance the disparate economic situations of the spouses”. She added that the woman’s degree in economics and the age at which her husband decided to leave her were also taken into consideration.

Lawyers in Argentina have called the verdict “very novel and the amount awarded to the plaintiff “unprecedented”.

OECD data shows that women do more unpaid work at home than men in all 10 of the most developed countries in the world…

At just 12-years-old, Leonardo Nicanor Quinteros is still in secondary school, but he already runs his own free private school to help other children, and even some adults, with their studies.

Leonardo loves to study, but he also wants to transfer his passion for education to his peers. After seeing some of his colleagues struggling to keep up at school, and other children spending too much time playing on the streets and completely neglecting their studies, he decided to do something about it. Last year, he told his grandmother, Ramona, that he wanted to operate his own school and asked her to help him build it next to her house, in the Argentinian town of Las Piedritas, near San Juan. She obliged, and today’s Nico’s free private school caters to nearly 40 young students. The 12-year-old acts both as teacher and principal and is proud that his initiative has already made a big difference for many of the children attending there.

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This is the story of Werner Jaisli, a Swiss man who in 2008 started building a giant, star-shaped ‘ovniport’ – a UFO landing spot – in an Argentinian desert, because aliens telepathically ordered him to.

It’s not clear exactly when Werner Jaisli arrived in Cachi, a small town in the Argentinian province of Salta, but it’s not hard to figure out what drew him to this place. The deserts of Salta have become famous among UFO enthusiasts around the globe, after several sightings of unidentified flying objects and other unexplained phenomena were reported in the area over the last few decades. On the night of November 24, 2008, Jaisli himself was allegedly contacted by aliens who gave him specific instructions on how to build a UFO landing port, aka ‘ovniport’.

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When faced with hardships in their lives, many people find them too challenging and give up, especially on their life dreams. But not for Gabriel Heredia.

Gabriel is a 20-year-old Argentinian barber who was born without hands. Despite his handicap, he was able to grow up happy and independent. He also always had the support of friends and family, never feeling discriminated at all by his schoolmates. In fact, his inspiration for such a line of work was his mother, who is a hairdresser. At the tender age of 14, he started working as a barber, and learned all the techniques to perfecting both haircuts and beard trimmings. Although he first saw it as a hobby, Gabriel quickly determined that this was the profession he wanted to work in.

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A Labrador in the Argentinian city of General Roca has become a local attraction and an online sensation for a very peculiar reason – he spent at least three days staring at the blue wall of a bus station and no one can explain why.

The dog, named Chicho by social media users who didn’t know his real name, spends most of his time at a blue bus stop in the Stefenelli neighborhood of General Roca. Whether he is standing on all fours or sitting, he keeps his eyes glued to the blue wall of the station, as if paying attention to something or someone that nobody else can see. In a video that has been doing the rounds on Latino social media, people are trying to distract Chicho or drive him away from the wall, but he keeps wagging his tail and staring at it. So far, no one has been able to explain why.

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Police inspectors in Pilar, Argentina’s Buenos Aires province, were recently questioned about the disappearance of 540 kg of marijuana from the evidence room, and the best explanation they could come up with was that addicted rats ate it all.

It all started in April 2017, when Commissioner Emilio Portero relieved his partner Javier Specia, as head of the police department in Pilar, a town located 60 km from the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires. Protocol dictates that in the case of such a transfer of command, a sort of inventory of everything left in the hands of his successor by the officer who is transferred to another unit be signed. Although the inventory was allegedly conducted, it was never signed by Specia, which made Portero suspicious. He notified the Division of Internal Affairs of the Police, which in turn tasked the National Gendarmerie with conducting an official inventory.

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An Argentinian man has recently been accused of changing both his gender and his name so he could retire at the age of 60, instead of 65. Although he acknowledges the changes, the former man claims he went through with them for personal reasons.

Sergio Lazarovich has become a topic of debate throughout South America, and soon probably the whole world, after he took advantage of his country’s Gender Identity Law to change his name to ‘Sergia’ and register himself as a female, allegedly so he could retire from his job five years earlier. His intentions were made public by a relative of Lazarovich, who contacted Argentinian media, telling reporters that throughout his life Sergio had only been romantically involved with women, and continued to have heterosexual relationships even after applying for the gender change.

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An Argentinian man has been making news headlines all over South America for experiencing a bizarre paranormal phenomenon. A hitchhiker he picked up from the side of the road allegedly disappeared from the front passenger seat of his truck, leaving behind only a burnt smell and melted shoe marks in the rubber car mats.

Pedro Peirone, from the town of San Jose de la Esquina, in Santa Fe, was driving home on February 26th, when he saw a young man hitchhiking on the side of the road. As he often did on his business trips around the province, Peirone pulled over and offered to give the boy a ride. Although the hitchhiker was a bit shy and reserved, Pedro says he seemed to be a regular teen the likes of which he often picked up. But while he can hardly remember the faces of most of the people he given rides to throughout the years, the memory of this particular boy will probably stay with him for the rest of his life.

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When it comes to getting money, some people will do just about anything, even marry their relatives. Take 25-year-old Mauricio Ossola, from Argentina, who last year married his 91-year-old great-aunt, so he could collect a widower’s pension after she died.

Mauricio moved in with his great aunt Yolanda, in the city of Salta, north-west Argentina, eight years ago, after his parents split up. He, his mother, her brother and his grandmother shared a home with the elderly woman in the neighborhood of Tres Cerritos, and apparently got along very well. So well, in fact, that two years ago Yolanda agreed to marry Mauricio so that he could collect a widower’s pension after she was gone. The then 23-year-old had told the woman that he planned to quit his law studies due to financial constraints , and she assured him that she would do everything she can to make sure he graduates. The young man recently admitted to reporters that he was the one who proposed they get married, and that she accepted. They tied the knot in February of 2015, in what he describes as a “discreet civil ceremony”.

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Located near the northeastern edge of Argentina, in the swampy marshes of Parana Delta, is an enigmatic floating island that allegedly rotates on its own axis. Nicknamed “The Eye”, the nearly perfect circular island has become the subject of an upcoming documentary that will try to unravel the mystery of its existence.

The Eye was discovered six months ago by Argentine film director & producer Sergio Neuspillerm, who was looking for filming locations for a film about paranormal occurrences, like ghost and alien sightings, in the area. After spotting the unusually round island surrounded by an equally round body of water on Google Earth, Neuspillerm and his crew knew they had stumbled upon something truly special, so they abandoned their original film project and decided to focus on this mystery instead.

“When locating this reference in the map we discovered something unexpected that left the film project in the background, we call it ‘The Eye’,” Neuspillerm said in a video. “The Eye is a circle of land surrounded by a thin channel of water with a diameter of 130 yards. Both circles [the water and land] are so perfect that it is hard to believe that this is a natural formation.”

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Pedro Luca, a 79-year-old man from Argentina is what you would call a 21st century caveman. He has been living in a grotto high up in the mountains of Tucuman Province for the last 4 decades.

Pedro says he had always wanted to live isolated in the middle of nature, even as a young boy. He was born and raised in San Pedro de Colalao, a small town about three-hours walking distance from his current home, but left home at 14 to make a living by transporting coal to Bolivia. When he cam back, 40 years ago, he decided to go through with his childhood dream, and set up camp in a mountain grotto, where he has been living ever since.

“Alcohol and violence can ruin a man,” Pedro says, remembering his days spent in civilization. “I prefer the wild. Now my only family are the animals.” He shares his cave home with 11 chickens and 2 goats who roam the mountainside all day long and return to the cave at nigh, seeking shelter from mountain lions and other predators living in the area.

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