villas

Villas  is a slang word for  the Spanish words, villa “village” and miseria “misery”. When we lived in Argentina before, we used to be able to see a little bit of this shanty town  from the freeway, but now, it has grown very close. As we were traveling across the overpass, I grabbed my camera and captured these pictures of where the very poor in Argentina live.

Normally, these settlements consist of shacks made of whatever can be found. The streets are usually not paved. Sometimes there is a network of  internal passages that link the different areas. The villas miseria have no sanitation system, though there may be water pipes passing through the settlement. Electric power is sometimes taken directly from the grid using illegal connections. Sadly, these towns continue to grow. The populations of the villas in Buenos Aires has more than doubled in the past 20 years.