Another view of the cathedral, this time with a pigeon (mostly, the air is alive with screeching parakeets).
The monastery of St Teresa was absolutely lovely - especially the little cloister, full of orange trees. There's still a very reclusive Carmelite nunnery attached, apparently.
The building houses a collection of religious art, some of it fine examples of nineteenth century kitsch;
but with some good carved and polychrome statues, and a handful of Peruvian paintings, like this lovely image of St Teresa herself, and her younger brother, running away as a child so that they could go and be martyrs to the Moors (very Dorothea-like).
The very mention of Moors made me think rather emphatically how much more magnificent Córdoba in Spain is ...
Then a walk to see - well, it's a bit like Westminster Cathedral redux, but from 1900-ish. There was no way of getting inside ...
and it looks to have needed a lot of holding up - these are very belabored workmen.
Indeed, one of the challenges with very non-touristy Córdoba is not being able to get to see things that one would like to - a grand hall and a chapel in the University would be prime examples, instead of which I found myself only able to enter things like the library reading room, which looked like ... a library reading room. Instead of which, things like this early C20th chapel (more Italian frescoes) which is somehow mangled up with a shopping center and art gallery were open, but ...
However, the Museo de Bellas Artes was definitely open, with a mostly dreadful exhibition of art by contemporary artists from Córdoba, and some much more haunting works commemorating, memorializing the Disappeared. Some 20,000 people passed through the detention center here in the center of the city between 1971-1983, during the military dictatorship (the building is now its own museum), and even the few rooms of art works here in the MBA were incredibly depressing, and so redolent of - well, my own generation. And they are a warning.
My guidebook cheerfully claimed that there were examples of nineteenth century art in this museum, but I could only find one work hanging - unless one counts the planning of the house itself, which is a monument to very late C19th taste if one were very rich and powerful, by Córdoban standards, at least. El Palacio Garzón was designed for the Garzón family by Emilio Caraffa - the same artist who supervised the frescos in the cathedral - and here he was responsible for the huge lunette on the ceiling of the main room, Sueño Veneciano, which depicts the Garzón family being transported through the Venice lagoon by a pair of horses - it is genuinely one of the most terrible pieces of symbolist art I've ever encountered, and that's saying something. I think the rest of the C19th art collection is in storage, and I wasn't tempted to ask to visit it.
Preferable by far were the Art Nouveau tiles in the entrance passage,
and the wrought-iron gates outside, ordered from the French firm Durenne's catalogue.
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