Epecuén

Villa Epecuén in Buenos Aires Province was a lakeside resort town of 5,000 residents until 1985, when the Lago Epecuén's dyke broke and the town was submerged under ten metres of hypersaline water. In 2009, the water began to recede, and what emerged was the ruins of a complete small city — streets, cars, trees turned white by salt, the foundations of houses, a clock tower — preserved in the brine for twenty-four years and now slowly deteriorating in the open air. The town is not being reconstructed. It is being remembered.

Lago Epecuén is a natural saline lake in Buenos Aires Province with a salinity several times higher than the ocean — the same salt concentration that has preserved the ruins of Villa Epecuén as a white, mineral-crusted record of pre-1985 Argentine resort culture. The lake's salt content fluctuates with rainfall and has been managed since the 1970s by a system of dykes; the 1985 flood was the result of a dyke failure combined with exceptionally high regional rainfall. The ruins include the remains of the Hotel Viena, the municipal slaughterhouse, the spa infrastructure that made Epecuén famous as a therapeutic bathing resort from the 1920s onwards, and the sole surviving resident — Rubén Córdoba, who returned to the ruins in 2009 and has lived there since as the last inhabitant of a submerged city. The photographer Alfredo Srur documented the ruins across multiple visits, and his work contributed to the site's international recognition.