The principal streets are now tolerably paved with granite brought from the islands above Buenos Ayres, especially from Martin Garcia. How the people got about before they were paved it is difficult to understand, for the streets must have been at times one continued slough; at least if one may judge from the state of those which are still unfinished, and which, after any continuance of wet weather, are nearly, if not entirely, impassable, even for people on horseback, much more so for carriages. I have seen in some of them the mire so deep that the oxen could not drag the country carts through it; and it not unfrequently happens, in such a case, that the animals themselves are unable to get out, and are left to die and rot in the swamp in the middle of the street.
It was a fair sample of the miserable economy and wretched policy of the colonial authorities, that a commercial city of such importance, and in which the traffic was daily increasing, should have been allowed so long to remain in such a state, with an inexhaustible supply of the best paving materials in the world within twenty or thirty miles of it, and of such easy water-carriage. The people however, were led to believe that the difficulties and impediments to such an improvement as the general paving of the city were next to insurmountable.
The Viceroy himself, the Marquis of Loreto, when the first notion of such a plan was started, gravely gave, amongst other reasons against it, the danger of the houses falling down from the shaking of their foundations, by the driving of heavy carts over a stone pavement so close to them, whilst another and still more weighty objection in his opinion was, the necessity it would entail upon the people to put iron tires to their cart-wheels, and to shoe their horses, which, he reminded them, would cost them more than the animals themselves. Fortunately, his immediate successors, Aredondo and Aviles, were not deterred by similar alarms. The former commenced the work with activity about the year 1795, with the aid of a subscription voluntarily raised by the inhabitants; and the latter carried it on to a much greater extent, levying a trifling duty upon the city for the purpose, which was readily submitted to, when, as the work advanced, the improvement became manifest. In later times, especially during the government of 1822-24, much more was done, and there are few of the principal streets which are not now more or less completed.
