The Frigate Libertad, a training ship of the Argentine Navy, arrived shortly after 11 this Thursday at the port of the Buenos Aires city of Mar del Plata, where it was received by local authorities and hundreds of tourists who gathered to see the historic ship.
With the Argentine flag flying on the mainmast and dozens of multicolored insignia, the ship arrived on a sunny day with little wind, after completing a journey of three and a half days since it left the port of Buenos Aires.
The frigate’s final destination is the Puerto Belgrano Base, in the Coronel Rosales district of Buenos Aires, where it will receive maintenance, but for the next 10 days it will remain in Mar del Plata and will be open to tourists who want to visit it.
The ship arrived one day before the commemoration of the 149th anniversary of the founding of the city of Mar del Plata.
The training trip is part of the preparations for a 6-month journey that the Frigate will begin in May and that will take the cadets of the Naval School through various ports around the world.
A good part of the trip, the ship sailed with its impressive sails unfurled, which were collected at the moment of anchoring offshore and entering the Naval Base, located in the Playa Grande area.
During the entrance to the port, hundreds of tourists and people from Mar del Plata began to upload images of the frigate captured from the coast and the pier of the naval base to social networks.
The boat, with about 300 crew members and cadets on board, arrived in the Mar del Plata waters shortly after 9 o’clock yesterday, Wednesday, after navigating the Río de la Plata and the Atlantic Ocean in the last 3 and a half days.
On its last day of sailing, the frigate’s crew, made up of 215 officers, non-commissioned officers and 65 cadets from the Naval School, worked on conditioning and training tasks.
The frigate will depart next May on an extensive training trip for the cadets, which will take them to various ports around the world, although the final itinerary has not yet been resolved.according to what the ship’s captain, Gonzalo Nieto, told Télam.
The instruction and study trip is the final step for the cadets to obtain the rank of midshipman, the initial rank of the Navy officer career.
“These are preparations for the 51st Training Voyage that will possibly begin at the end of April or at the beginning of May, and that will take the frigate on its journey through various ports around the world,” The Navy’s press officer, Captain Carlos Gómez Nolasco, pointed out to Télam.
On its journey through the waters of the Río de la Plata, before heading out to the open sea, the frigate was honored by three Naval Aviation planes of the Argentine Navy that left the Punta Indio Naval Air Base and performed low-flying flights and acrobatics as a welcome to the frigate
The same thing happened with his arrival at the port of Mar del Plata, where several boats from the Navy and the Prefecture welcomed him, while on the deck of the frigate the cadets and non-commissioned officers carried out a formation in their gala costumes.
The frigate ARA Libertad and the icebreaker Almirante Irízar are two of the ships that the Navy has, and that most attract the attention of the civilian public, and on this occasion they will remain open as of Friday.
Once this period is over in the seaside resort in the south of Buenos Aires, the frigate will continue its journey towards the base of Puerto Belgrano where they will carry out maintenance tasks with a view to the beginning of the trip around the world.
