Ports in Argentina — Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and San Francisco

Cargo from China reaches Argentina mainly through Buenos Aires, with the Paraná river ports of Santa Fe and San Francisco serving the agricultural hinterland. This page gives berth and depth data, river constraints and indicative transit times from our records.

Indicative transit times from China

Transit ranges are indicative and move with carrier, routing and season. The door-to-door figure for FCL in our source file sat below its own port-to-port range, which cannot be right, so treat any door-to-door promise as unconfirmed until the carrier schedule is fixed.

Port information: Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is Argentina’s principal commercial port, on the Río de la Plata on the country’s central-eastern coast, north-east of the city. Sailing distances from the port give a feel for the region: 125 nm east to Montevideo, 1,150 nm north-east to Rio de Janeiro, 3,720 nm to Cape Town, 510 nm south-west to Bahía Blanca and 1,370 nm to Punta Arenas at the Strait of Magellan. The port stretches north–south along the shore in three sections — North, Central and South — and is run by the state port authority, making it the country’s leading transshipment point for foreign trade.

Port information: Santa Fe

Santa Fe is Argentina’s river port for grain exports, on the west bank of the lower Paraná in the east of the country. Its service facilities include ship repair, bunkering, a dry dock, launches, medical care, towage, fresh water, provisions and repatriation, with no waste-disposal plant. The stretch of river between Rosario and Santa Fe is comparatively narrow, with a maintained depth of about 6.7 m in our source records, so deep-draft ocean vessels often work at Rosario instead.

The port offers dedicated grain berths, bagged-cargo berths (sugar and rapeseed), general-cargo berths and tanker berths. Esso, Shell and other oil companies keep their own berths, the quays carry a full set of cargo-handling and warehouse facilities, and railway lines run directly onto the general-cargo, bagged-cargo and grain berths.

Port information: San Francisco

San Francisco, as listed in our source records, is a smaller Paraná-system river port handling mainly bulk grain and vegetable oil. Its entrance channel splits into northern and southern branches, with about 7 m of water over the river-mouth bar and 10 m at the channel entrance. Four bulk berths line 675 m of quay at depths of 7–12 m.

“San Francisco” is an easy port name to mislabel — several references attach this grain trade to the San Lorenzo–Puerto San Martín reach of the Paraná. Confirm the exact berth and pilotage plan with us before booking.