Jan. 5-6, 2023
We enjoyed our first overnight port in Buenos Aires, but also ended the first mini-segment – so some friends headed home, but I am sure new ones boarded. We planned a couple of different walking tours – one on each day. Day #1 – we got some wires crossed regarding the location of the start of our walking tour or the Barracas neighborhood (the guide gave us a pharmacy at a crossroad – but there is more than one pharmacy with that name, and the road names were similar)– so missed the first half after spending close to 1 ½ hours chasing the group via Uber. When we arrived, John was furious and it showed, and was asked not to go on the tour – so he went off on his own and I did the second half of the tour with Gustavo and five others.
I didn’t realize that I joined in time to discover a bit of a “theme” for my two days. Gustavo showed us a beautiful church – the Church of “Saint” Felicity. But there is no “Saint Felicity”. Felicity was the only surviving daughter of the very wealthy Guerrero family. At the age of 16, her family arranged a marriage to the important, wealthy and much older Martin de Algaza. They had two children, one was stillborn, the other died at the age of 6 from Yellow Fever. Not long after the death of their child, Martin also died. She was 23, beautiful, wealthy and ready to have a life of her own. Rather than living her life in mourning, she had several relationships. One of the more serious suitors left for Europe, and months later, with no word, she fell in love with another man. On the eve of her wedding to suitor #2, suitor #1 reappeared, and killed her in a jealous rage. Her family took their enormous wealth and built a church in her honor. The problem, she wasn’t a saint, so the church could not be consecrated – no weddings or funerals, but they have services twice per week for the community and the church is only open for those services (from the beginning, there were issues about the church being named for someone not a saint, and the church was vandalized, so is kept locked).
The walking tour continued on to the neighborhood of artist Marino Santa Maria. He decided to paint his house in the style of his paintings. The neighbors loved it so much, they joked about him painting their houses. He decided to let them pick the pattern from his artwork and proceeded to spend the next two years painting 46 houses in a 4-block area. He quickly discovered that the paint he was using did not work well as outdoor paint, and changed to mosaic tiles. He completed the area in 1999, and continues to do touch ups to this day.
One of the quirky things I learned about Buenos Aireans – how they pick their lottery numbers: through their dreams. Events/Items/ people in the dream are translated to numbers. It became so common that there is an “official” list (this is the “clean” one – Gustavo said there’s also a risqué one)
After the tour, I met up with John at a coffee shop, we returned to the ship for a rest before heading out to take advantage of the overnight. I wanted to see the Palacio Barolo – an art deco building with floors based upon The Divine Comedy. You need to book a tour to see them, and not knowing our times I did not schedule in advance. At 3:55 they had some 4PM tours available – but we were over twenty minutes away. The ground floor was open and free- so decided to use the area as our starting point for wandering the parks and shopping districts in the area.
The next day we took a GuruWalk of the Recoleta – the cemetery of the wealthy of Buenos Aires. Near the entrance was a tomb with tissues and ribbons tied upon the gate – the tomb of “Saint” Felicity. People tied tissues for her to wipe her tears since she never experienced “true love”.
We saw impressive tombs of many of the better-known residents of the city, including its most famous – Evita Duarte Perone. Her brief but spectacular life precluded the very sad several decades for her corpse. A coup d’etat a few years after her death sent president Juan Peron into exile, and her corpse, which had lain in a glass tomb since her death, to be removed and “kept safe” by Eduardo Lonardi’s associate. The associate murdered his own wife, supposedly thinking she was Evita’s ghost, and the body was moved – eventually sent to Milan, Italy under the false name of Maria Maggi, where she lay for about 10 years. The body was returned to Juan Peron in Spain in 1971, and remained in Spain until Juan Peron’s death in 1974 (In 1973 he was elected as President with his 3rd wife as his VP, his wife brought Evita’s body back to Argentina to lay with him). She now lays in the simple Duarte family crypt, where visitors line up to get a brief picture, many leave flowers.
The most impressive monument is for Dr. Luis Federico Leloir, one of Argentina’s winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. In his life, he had forgone trappings of wealth, in his death, his family had other ideas.
We spent our last few hours in the city enjoying a pint at a bar across from the cemetery. The beer was good and cold. The artwork in and near the bathroom was quirky. But even more interesting was the photo I took in the bathroom.
A little shopping and then back to the ship.
History lesson I: (we have 3 stops in Argentina – so I’ll divide the history as well)
Few countries have as many agricultural growing zones as Argentina, the 8th largest country in the world by size, with territories stretching from the sub-tropical in the north to the sub-arctic in the south. Before the Europeans arrived, the powerful Incas resided in the far northwest along with the Diaguita, the Guarani in the more central regions, the Querandhi in the area now known as Buenos Aires, the Tuehuelche along what is now Patagonia, and the Ona near Tierra del Fuego. Many of the original inhabitants were enslaved, but other groups fled into the Andes and areas difficult for the settlers to follow. Roughly 300,000 people called the region home prior to colonization, by 1810, about 100,000 fist peoples lived in the territory.
Although discovered and claimed by Spain in the early 1500’s, permanent colonies were not established until the later part of the century as part of the Viceroyalty of Peru. And unlike Uruguay – rich veins of silver were found – giving it the name of Argentina from the Latin word for silver (argentum), and over the years, veins of precious sapphires and semi-precious onyx, turquoise, rhodochrosite (Inca Rose – the national stone of Argentina) were mined. Argentina was not as amenable to sugar cane and cash crops, but the vast grasslands of the Pampas and Patagonia were very good for cattle – and the gaucho was born. Argentina as a territory separated from Peru in 1776, then gained independence from Spain in 1816. With vast lands and few inhabitants, the new country welcomed immigrants from all over Europe – with half of them from Italy, but large numbers from Spain, France, Russia and Germany came in droves to the new world.
Next stop – Puerto Madryn and then Antarctica! (I have many, many layers).
Good job keep it coming