Sir Francis Drake made a reconnaissance of the coast and its sea lion colonies; Don Juan de Garay explored the area by land a few years later, in 1581.

In 1742, during the War of Jenkins' Ear, eight survivors of HMS Wager, part of Admiral Anson expedition and led by midshipman Isaac Morris, lived through a ten-month ordeal before being decimated and captured by the Tehuelches, who eventually handed them to the Spaniards.

1857–1874: The Portuguese entrepreneur José Coelho de Meirelles, taking advantage of the country's abundance of wild cattle, built a pier and a factory for salted meat near Cabo Corrientes, but the business only lasted a few years.

1930–1946: A military coup reinstated the Conservative hegemony in politics through electoral fraud and corruption, but at local levels they were quite progressive, their policies viewed in some way as a continuity of the socialist trend.

[6][7] Before this, a dirt road connected Mar del Plata to Buenos Aires using a different route, required almost two days to travel by car.

A coalition between socialists and radicals defeated this new party by a narrow margin in Mar del Plata, but by 1948 Peronism came to dominate the local administration.

The massive tourism, triggered by the welfare politics of Perón and the surge of the middle class marked a huge growth in the city's economy.

1955–1970: After the fall of Perón, the socialists regained the upper hand in local politics; the city reached the peak in activities like construction business and building industry.

1989–2010: Though Peronism replaced the radicals in central government amid a national financial crisis, the latter party continued to rule in Mar del Plata.

Some resurgence of mass tourism in the early '90s was followed by a deep social crisis in town, with an increase of poverty, jobless rates and emigration.

As part of the Argentine recreational coast, tourism is Mar del Plata's main economic activity, with over eight million tourists visiting the city in annually.

Mar del Plata is also an important sports centre with a multi-purpose Olympic style stadium (first used for the 1978 World Cup and later upgraded for the 1995 Pan American Games), five golf courses and many other facilities.

[14] During the mid-1980s, Mar del Plata saw the birth of electronics factories, focused mostly on the telecommunications field, with two of them, Nexuscom and DelSat, succeeding in the international market.

[22] Since the 2000s, a local company builds and develops oil industry equipment, with customers in the United States, Russia, Oman and Egypt.

In 2012, Mar del Plata became a wine-producing area, when a wine company from Mendoza province produced 20,000 lt from a vineyard at Chapadmalal beach from grape varieties such as Sauvignon blanc, Chardonnay, Riesling and Gewürztraminer.

The city has, for those who do religious tourism, an interesting interreligious circuit that includes a visit among Catholics, in addition to the Cathedral, the Schoenstatt Sanctuary, the “Christ” of the South Jetty, a replica of the Lourdes Grotto, the Chapels of Stella Maris and Santa Cecilia, of other cults is the Russian Orthodox Church of Mar del Plata.

Mar del Plata has a wide variety of clubs located by district: the area of Escollera Norte (known for its quantity of pubs and nightclubs) and Constitution Avenue.

The development of the city as a seasonal summer resort in the early 20th century led upper class tourists from Buenos Aires to build a European-inspired architecture, based mainly on the picturesque and later on the art deco styles.

During the 1930s, 1940s, and beyond, local architects and builders, like Auro Tiribelli, Arturo Lemmi, Alberto Córsico-Picollini and Raúl Camusso recreated and transformed the picturesque values into a middle-class scale, marking the beginning of a vernacular architecture, called Mar del Plata Style, consisting in small samples of the luxury-laden summer residences of high society, built for the summer visitor as well as for the local resident.

These chalets were built with stone façades, gable roofs covered with Spanish or French tiles, prominent eaves and front porches.

This gives the town some distinctive urban character compared with other Argentine cities, despite the fact that the growing mass of tourists in the '60s imposed the construction of large apartment buildings and skyscrapers as the predominant architectural style downtown.

The West-Southwest winds can take the temperature below 0 °C (32 °F) between mid May and early October, while the Southeast ones (the so-called Sudestada) are stronger, producing coastal showers and rough seas, as well as strong squalls, but the cold is much less intense.

[70] In 1919, Mar del Plata became the first town in South America to have a Socialist Mayor, a son of Italian Immigrants, Teodoro Bronzini.

There is a work by the American political scientist Susan Stokes[72] about the democratic process in Mar del Plata since 1983 in comparison to other regions of Argentina.

[73][74] One of the main theses of her articles is that the social and economic development of Mar del Plata was quite atypical, with a strong prevalence of middle-class values that discouraged the policy of clientelism that is the common background in other urban environments of Argentina.

Mar del Plata hosted six matches in the 1978 FIFA World Cup at the Estadio José María Minella, which was built for the sporting event.

[80] In 2003 Mar del Plata hosted the 2nd Parapan American Games that featured 1,500 athletes from 28 countries competed in nine sporting events.