Merlo covers 170 km2 (66 sq mi) and is bordered by the partidos of Morón and Ituzaingó (northeast), La Matanza (southeast), Marcos Paz (southwest), and Moreno and the Reconquista River (northwest).

The city of Merlo was formerly important solely as a railroad junction and trade centre for the surrounding agricultural and pastoral lands.

The region was largely inhabited by the taluhet people, part of the het nation, a hunter-gatherer society better known by the exonym querandi.

In 1636 the territory of today's Merlo was divided into a few haciendas, given as land grants by Governor Pedro Esteban Dávila to a few and influential Buenos Aires neighbors.

The bigger hacienda was granted to the Company of Jesus and the resulting production provided the Jesuits the financial resources to maintain the schools they had in Buenos Aires.

The Jesuit priests Thomas Falkner[2] and Florian Paucke[3] visited the region in the mid 18th century and described the area plenty of herds of feral cattle and horses roaming free on the plains and numerous packs of dogs that feed on them and sometimes attacked the unwarned and helpless travelers.

By the 18th century the Araucanian people were moving from the lap of the Andes Mountains to the Pampas, attracted by the numerous cattle and horses herds.

The Araucanians looted and sacked the Spanish settlements around Buenos Aires, performing unexpected horse mounted attacks known in the Southern Cone as malones (s. malón, from Mapudungun malocán: “to make war”).

Juan Dillon was a businessman, absentee landlord and public official, member of the prosperous Irish community in Buenos Aires.

After Rosas’ fall in 1852, Juan Dillon was appointed Juez de Paz (Justice of Peace) in Morón (1855–1856) and military commander for the region.

After that, Dillon and his family moves to La Plata when he was elected senator and served during three terms in the Buenos Aires legislature, in which he chaired the budget commission.

Dillon established in Merlo and in 1859 he commissioned the famous architect and engineer Pedro Benoit to design the layout of the town, organizing it on a rectangular grid of streets and blocks.

The election of the authorities took place in the same year and only sixty-four citizens voted; the first municipal government was integrated by Juan Dillon as Juez de Paz and Antonio Suárez, Francisco Sullivan, Fernando Pearson and Tomás Gahan as Municipales or Councilors.

Thousands of neighbors fled Buenos Aires to the countryside when a cholera epidemic first, and a yellow fever outbreak later, afflicted the city in 1867 and 1871 respectively.

These events brought many Spaniard, Basque, Italian and French immigrants to Merlo, contributing with a highly qualified working force.

During the first half of the 20th century the two mayor political forces in the district were the Radical Civic Union and the Conservative Party of Buenos Aires.

Between 1947 and 1960 the district quintuplicates its population, initiating a rapid process of urbanization and incorporating Merlo into the Greater Buenos Aires.

In María O'Donnell's non-fiction book El Aparato (The Political Machine) an entire chapter is dedicated to Othacehé, portraying him as a corrupt politician.

Wholesale and retail trade, repair of motor vehicles 10.32%; transport, storage and communication 5%; financial intermediation, real estate and renting 13.72%.

Villa San Antonio del Camino started with 101 inhabitants grouped into twelve families, most of them Spaniard and Criollo people.

The head town connects with the Acceso Oeste Highway by an alternate route, such as the Camino de la ribera which crosses along the Reconquista River.

The Sarmiento Railway Line runs alongside the Rivadavia Avenue and transports the vast majority of commuters to and from Buenos Aires.

The line is managed by Transportes Metropolitanos it had not received investments in the past years and its trains and stations are practically abandoned.