A Nobel Prize-winning economist once said there were four kinds of countries: the developed, the underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina. He meant it as a puzzle — how does a country with some of the finest farmland on Earth, the world's greatest beef culture, and a population that produces Borges and Messi and Piazzolla keep finding new ways to make itself poorer?

Argentina is the eighth-largest country on Earth. The Andes run its entire western edge, home to Aconcagua — the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. The Pampas feed a hundred million cattle. Patagonia stretches cold and empty to the tip of the continent. And at the northeastern corner, Iguazú Falls — 275 cascades across 2.7 kilometres — are the largest waterfall system on Earth.

Ray takes you through the full sweep: the gauchos and the immigration wave that made Buenos Aires the Paris of South America; the rise and fall and return of Juan Perón; Evita — dead at 33, mythologised ever since; the Dirty War in which 30,000 people were disappeared; the Falklands; the 2001 economic collapse that produced five presidents in ten days. And the 2022 World Cup, which ended 36 years of hurt and produced what witnesses described as the largest spontaneous human gathering in the history of the Southern Hemisphere.

We meet Borges, who invented ideas that philosophers and computer scientists are still working through. We meet Maradona — the Hand of God and the Goal of the Century in the same five minutes. We meet Messi. We meet Astor Piazzolla, who turned tango into concert music. And we eat asado — not a recipe, a religion — and dulce de leche and empanadas and drink Malbec from the vineyards of Mendoza.

And we learn what the pause in a tango actually means.

New episodes every Monday at 7pm. Next week — Armenia.