Remedios de Escalada is a city located in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, within Lanús Partido, Gran Buenos Aires. It covers an area of 9.95 km2 and the population was 81,465 in 2001; the demonym for its inhabitants is "escaladense."
The town was first established by Agustín Eguren as Edén Argentino ("Argentine Eden"), a bedroom community, in 1873. Its population remained in the few hundreds until, in 1890, the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway inaugurated a rail yard in the adjoining Villa Galíndez, to the east; La Fraternidad, one of Argentina's first and oldest trade unions, was founded by workers at the site in 1887. Further such installations opened by Eliseo Ramírez and the Ramírez de Lafuente family in 1901 made the area a prime rail operations hub, and the Great Southern inaugurated its first commuter station there in 1902.
The Club Atlético Talleres de Remedios de Escalada, the town's first football club, was established in 1906, and plays in the lower leagues of Argentine football. The town became home to a sizable community of Italian Argentines in the subsequent years, and prominent among these was Luis Máspero, who operated one of the country's largest hat factories, and Víctor Marangoni, owner of an important metalworks establishment; the Italian Mutual Insurance and Assistance Company was established here in 1913.
A number of important cooperatives, notably El Hogar Argentino (1911) and La Internacional (1914), opened in the town during that era, as did La Idea, a news daily, in 1915, and the Unión Ferroviaria, a nationally prominent yellow union organized as a counterweight to the intransigent La Fraternidad, in 1921. The Roman Catholic Parish of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios ("Our Lady of Remedies") was consecrated in 1924, and in 1933, Villa Galíndez and the Argentine Eden were incorporated as Remedios de Escalada (in honor of María de los Remedios de Escalada, wife of the leader of the Argentine War of Independence, General José de San Martín).
Remedios de Escalada was formally declared a city by the Buenos Aires Province Legislature in 1974. The city later suffered from the effects of a failed plan during the 1976-83 dictatorship to expand the General Paz Freeway from the Villa Riachuelo ward in Buenos Aires to the city of Avellaneda; never completed, the demolitions resulting from the project left an extensive swath along the city of empty lots which, in many cases, were not adequately reurbanized. The National University of Lanús, one of the smaller national universities, was established here in 1995.
