Córdoba, day 2

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.

 

Córdoba

This is not a diary: if it were, it'd have the way before dawn start in freezing temperatures; the adventure of buying gas (they pump it for you!); the car rental return (you have to get a parking ticket to enter the airport, seemingly); the excitement of wondering whether I'd make my connection, after Aerolíneas Argentinas decided it would be fun to have the connecting flight to Córdoba leave not from the airport it was originally scheduled to depart from, but the one the other side of the city ... good job it's the 25th May, the anniversary of the formation of the revolutionary government (independence proper from Spain happened in 1816), and so Buenos Aires was atypically traffic-free.  But there's a lot of old Spain left in Córdoba - an old Jesuit center - and that was a big part of my wanting to see what, so far, is a rather charming city, even if the light was fading by the time I'd checked in and could head out to explore.

Here's the cathedral: built in the C18th, and the Baroque ceiling decorations ... done by Italian artists in the early C20th.

I think this is the Monasteria de Santa Teresa, but I'd want to check on that ... So much to see tomorrow!

The city is known for its honey.

... and this is the view from my hotel roof: an empty city, because everyone's at home eating or having eaten locro - a potato and corn and sausage stew that's typical criollo food, and what everyone (bar me - none came my way at airports) eats today ...

 

more lakes

Today - a long day - I was picked up way before dawn (mind you, dawn isn't until 8 50 or so, Bariloche being so far south), and then headed north to San Martin de los Andes, a really lovely little town, via the Seven Lakes.  There are, of course, a while lot more than seven, and I felt very sorry for the tiny ones, as big (or as small) as Queenmere on Wimbledon Common, which clearly don't count at all.  And then there were plenty of autumnal landscapes looking like Millais paintings.

I learned a surprising amount about lakes today: the ones that rivers flow into; the ones that flow into each other; the ones that are self contained.

Small patches of autumn;

and larger ones (again, one could be forgiven for thinking one were in Scotland).

This was my favorite: Lago Falkner (Tomas Falkner seems to have been a fascinating man: born in Liverpool in 1702 and died in Shropshire in 1784; was initially a Calvinist but studies medicine in Cordoba; became a Jesuit missionary in Patagonia; managed not to get massacred; and went back to Cordoba to teach mathematics for 11 years; was a competent botanist; went to Cadiz, Italy, and back to England where he wrote a Description of Patagonia).  We weren't actually told this: Wikipedia was hastily consulted just now ...

This is a young Chimango hawk.

more autumn;

and sometimes, you're just very thankful you opted to go on a minibus tour, so that someone else could do all the driving and you could look at the views, and not be worrying about obstacles in the road (at another point, there were a lot of sheep).

 

Bariloche and lakes

Some brief shafts of sunlight this evening - this is the stunning view from my balcony, over Lago Nahuel Huapi.  But much of the day was grey and bleak and chilly, much like Bariloche city center, or some Scottish provincial town on a bad day (it's the granite that does it, too).  Bariloche is a weird place: properly founded at the beginning of the C20th, although some didn't-end-happily mission activity took place in the region before then, and there were settlers - some British; the first road from/to Buenos Aires was built in 1913 and Theodore Roosevelt visited the same year (and was influential in helping the establishment of National Parks here); then Austrians, and Germans - a lot of Germans in the 1940s, and certainly local myths have it that a number of Nazis fled here (others debunk that, but).  It certainly tries to look like a Germano-Swiss sports town, which means that post-summer watersports and hiking, and pre-ski-ing may not mean that one catches the town at its best, right now.

It's also known for chocolate making - which is seeing the influence, like everything other than LA hotel bookings, of World Cup Fever.

The cathedral church is a pretty magnificent plain structure, made from granite blocks, and with stained glass history "showing local history" - for which, read massacres at the hands of indigenous people.

More interesting to me was the figure of Gauchito Gil, on the back of this food truck: Gil is a folk saint; a nineteenth-century hero who was like the Argentian Robin Hood; wildly popular after the 1990s, in particular, when he became an icon of resistance.

And then I hopped in the car and drove south down Route 40, which runs 5,194 miles down the whole length of Argentina.  No, it's not a big interstate: it's a two lane highway with a lot of potholes (I thought it was ominous when the guy at the car rental showed me where the jack and spare wheel are ...) - but more than that, precious few pull-out places.  So the trouble with driving is despite beautiful view after beautiful view, there are very few opportunities for taking pictures... This is of Lago Gutiérrez;

and the next of Lago Mascardi.  I then went past Lago Guillermo - and shortly after that not only did the string of lakes come to an end, but I was heading uphill, and the Andes looked very cold and inhospitable, and I was out of cellphone reach, so (when I could - probably about 8 miles further on - no houses, no side roads: I've always like bleak landscape but this was pushing it) I turned round.  If I'd carried on for another couple of hours, I'd have got to where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid holed up, which was tempting... but the internet tells me their cabin is closed, and who knows where there may be gas stations??

You'd have thought this was obvious, but maybe there are days when that water looks more tempting than today ...

 

Buenos Aires to Bariloche

First, this morning, the Japanese Garden, including a scultured dead tree;

and lots of fat koi.

En route to the Museum of Latin American Art (which didn't open until noon), many dogwalkers with huge entourages;

and the Museo itself was spectacular, and a crash course in C20th-C21st Latin American art, from Indigenismo

through surrealism (how come I've never taken Remedios Varo on board before?  This is an extract from her self-portrait, but all her work here is wonderful);

to slowly rotating light disks.  I had to flee too soon, to catch my flight ...

Not pictured: the flight to Bariloche, over 1200 miles of nothingness - the very very occasional estancia, which just left me wondering how they made/got power, or how you could ensure that you didn't run out of gas all the time.  Now I see why this country has so few railroads: they would be wildly unprofitable.  I don't think I've ever seen so much emptiness.  It was dark by the time I drove out of the airport in a little Fiat: first past pine trees and then more pine trees, and then into town, which was full of roundabouts - I hate it when my prim English GPS says "take the sixth exit," especially when driving norms are - well, different - and then down a road past some of the lake and eventually found my way into my crazily wonderful hotel (my room has a lake view, yes, but also a jacuzzi, a steam shower, and a sauna - I wish I were staying here a week).  And no, it's not the supposedly truly upmarket place, here ... This is the blurred, for some reason, view from my balcony: more tomorrow, in daylight.  I was, very happily, welcomed by the hotel cat.

 

one more day in BA

I had to start the day by going to El Ateneo Grand Splendid: indeed, a wonderfully situated bookstore, in an old theater (and with a very good selection of books, too) - and then went to La Boca, the touted-up part of which makes a great thing out of what were once immigrant houses down by the old port - largely tenements housing newly arrived, made of corrugated iron, and painted with colors left over from painting ships.  El Caminito was actually unbearably touristy (and remember, it's May! the equivalent of November) - not so much in terms of crowds, but because of hard-on sell (and this doubtless was intensified for me by passing a food pantry just before I got there).

It had something of the would-be cheerful air of modular housing in LA made from shipping containers ...

even if, yes, it was striking.

Even half a street away, however, it felt less ... freshly painted.

As you'd anticipate, I found the 1950s bas relief panels a fascinating carry-over from C19th Italian socialist art traditions: this, La sirga, is by Julio César Vergottini.

I got off the colectivo (#152, this time) at the very beginning of La Boca, however - about twenty five minute's walk north of here, which gave me a much better sense of the decaying nature of the district as a whole - with some lovely examples of early twentieth century/late nineteenth century architecture, all the same - including some houses that could have come straight out of London dockland; and also brought home that this is a barrio completely dominated by soccer.  Deep blue and yellow - the colors of the La Boca team - were everywhere.

Why the side of the La Boca stadium should include a mural of some firefighters rescuing a mermaid rather baffled me.

I was left hoping, at the end of this, that Argentina will win the World Cup: I know the history involving England is a long one (and yes, I did see a Maradona-themed bus painted with the legend "La Mano de Dios")

There was, of course, some non-football-themed wall art, too.

Then there were houses that gave one, I think, a much better idea of what the neighborhood probably looked like.

And the pièce de resistance, waiting, surely, for their lunch.