Unlike other ports included in the PortADa project, the Port of Buenos Aires does not have a single publication that continuously covers the selected historical period. For this reason, the team of historians at this node identified and selected four periodicals —three daily newspapers and one weekly— which, together, allow for the reconstruction of relevant information on maritime traffic.
The first of these publications is La Gaceta Mercantil, the chosen source for the period between January 1850 and January 1852. This is followed by the English-language weekly British Packet and Argentine News, covering the period from 1 February to 30 April 1852. From May of that year until December 1869, the newspaper El Nacional was used, while La Prensa covers the final stretch, from January 1870 to the end of the study period.

The first two publications, La Gaceta Mercantil and British Packet, have been digitised and are available online via the portal of the National Library of the Argentine Republic (https://www.bn.gov.ar/). From these sources, the specific pages containing information on arrivals and port traffic were extracted.

In contrast, the maritime news from El Nacional and La Prensa had to be digitised specifically for this project. The digitisation took place between May and October 2024 at two key institutions: the Newspaper Archive of the Mariano Moreno National Library and the Prebisch Library of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic (https://www.bcra.gob.ar/BCRAyVos/Biblioteca_Prebisch.asp).

At the National Library, work was carried out using the earliest issues of El Nacional, from May 1852, and the first decades of La Prensa, from 1870 to 1892, were also photographed. Later, at the Central Bank Library, the maritime news from La Prensa corresponding to the years 1893 to 1914 was digitised.

The selected publications display remarkable consistency in the type of information reported, although as the study period progresses, the richness of that information tends to diminish. From each of them, based on the data published, information was retrieved regarding the arrival of vessels: date of publication, date of arrival, flag, type of vessel, name of the ship, tonnage (presumably in gross tonnage), name of the captain or skipper, port of departure, departure date, stopovers (when such information was provided), date of stopover, consignee or owner of the cargo, and a description of the cargo (passengers, goods, money, etc.).
Despite the absence of a single press source, the documentary body thus assembled allows for a highly detailed reconstruction of maritime traffic through the Port of Buenos Aires over the entire period. Its richness and variety make these sources an essential resource for the historical study of port dynamics in the Río de la Plata.