Now for some history about one of Argentina’s political leaders Justo Jose de Urquiza! In order to learn about Urquiza, Colin and I decided to visit the Palacio San Jose located just outside the town of Conception del Uruguay. Before heading to the palace, we spent a day/night (July 21st) in a place also called San Jose – however, this city was about 2 hours by bus from the palace we intended to see. No worries! This gave us a chance to see some of ‘small town’ Argentina. Once we arrived at the bus station we made our way to the home of our couchsurfing friend, Silvio. He greeted us with a snack of empanadas and told us about his future plans to take off and bike around the world. After a nice chat the three of us decided to walk into town so Silvio could show us around!
San Jose isn’t a large town at all – in fact, it is smaller than a lot of college campuses in the USA with just 15,000 people. The day we arrived there happened to be a mate festival going on – the first one in what is to be an annual tradition! We thought we might check it out, but at Silvio’s suggestion, we first went to one of the local museums on the history of the San Jose area and the numerous immigrants who populated the area, and the rest of Argentina.
As shown in the map from the San Jose museum below, most immigrants during the 19th century to Argentina came from Italy and Spain, although there was also a sizeable Jewish immigrant population. Argentina was really ‘being born’ as a country during the early 1900’s, as its population rose from 4 million in 1895 to 7.9 million in 1914. Into the mid 1900’s, Argentina’s immigrant population jumped yet again to 15.8 million by 1947 as the pressures of World War impacted Europe and 1.5 million Spaniards and 1.5 million Italians made their way to the new world.
The museum started with a room resembling an immigrant ship from Europe, showing us popular items brought on the boats. The additional rooms were made up like early immigrants’ houses, with carriages, wine-making machines, and home tools outside, and furniture inside. There were tons of artifacts from immigrants who came to Argentina in the early 1900’s throughout the exhibit, with some more ‘modern’ items, such as old cars, as the timeline carried on. One of the really interesting signs we saw was a blown-up copy of an old map dividing up the town of San Jose into even plots for different immigrant family members. After a tiny bit of searching, the three of us found Silvio’s extended family’s plot on the map! Awesome. 
After the museum, Silvio, Colin and I walked through the park near San Jose’s 1st Annual Mate de Te Festival. Two of Silvio’s friends ended up meeting up with us and chatting throughout our walk around the park. At the festival, we were invited to take some photos and help some of the local children practice their English by speaking to us, as Silvio’s friend was their English teacher at school. They were all very shy. We all watched some of the festival events, which included a race to see who could make the best Mate drink with the fastest time. I’m not sure if anyone ended up winning as the group dumped sugar, lemon, and other things into their glasses before running around but it looked like a lot of fun! We were pretty intrigued by seeing the lemon being used in mate – we hadn’t seen that before, just Mate made classically using Yerba or another herb blend. Silvio’s friends decided to show us Mate – Argentinian style – and with tea! They brought us back to their place to pick up some supplies, then we all went back to Silvio’s for a taste-test.
Once back at Silvio’s, we sat around the table to try this unique mate. This mate was different because of the amount of fruit used in making it. There was an entire cut banana and half an orange in the mate cup! There were also 4 bags of different types of teas – including mint, lemon, and regular teas. In addition to the sugar and hot water poured on top of this collection of sweet goodness were a couple of leaves pulled off a mate plant. Just a couple! (Take a look at my close-up picture of the mate being made to see the three leaves we put in the cup.) This resulted in a super sweet and very enjoyable mate drink! Probably one of the nicest tasting ‘fruit teas’ I’ve ever had! (Although it is supposed to be a TON of calories.) While this isn’t the traditional mate, Colin and I realized with their help that mate has come to mean a hot drink you add water to and drink through a bombilla for some people – even if it doesn’t have much actual mate or yerba plants inside the cup! The five of us drank the mate and munched on some snacks Silvio set out, but before long his friends had to leave.
It was getting close to dinnertime, and Silvio suggested we order a pizza. Yum! The rest of the evening was spent talking, playing some guitar, and relaxing. We signed up to a great language-learning website Silvio turned us on to called duolingo.com, so we could practice our Spanish. I’ve done a few lessons with Rosetta Stone for Spanish (which costs $500+ USD) and I have to say, this website is exactly like Rosetta Stone lessons but for FREE! What a great tip. Silvio also told us about some great music and charitable projects associated with them – such as PlayingforChange.com and their work. They try to educate people through spreading the arts, especially music. One of the videos described how the organization helps teach Nepalese women their rights. In this video, I heard a quote describing how many of these poor people have gone without education, but not without music. Music is familiar to these women and can help them when combined with teaching. Take a look at some of the videos Silvio shared with us below!
The next morning, July 22nd, Colin and I had to leave early to make our bus to Concepcion del Uruguay. We stopped by Silvio’s work (as he was already there) to drop off his key, then caught our bus. Just a couple hours later we arrived in Concepcion. There were a few problems we weren’t aware of beforehand, however. When we got to the bus station, we realized a taxi would cost quite a lot to take us to Palacio San Jose. With a great stroke of luck, we managed to find a tourist agency that knew about tours to the palace. An Argentinian guy watching us struggle with our limited Spanish in the agency decided to help us out by giving us a lift to the tourist point the agency suggested to us (what a kind help!) where we spoke with a tour operator who arranged for us to go to Palacio San Jose at around 1:00 pm for $25 USD for both of us, including transportation back to the bus station in the evening. Great!
This gave us time to walk around and explore Concepcion del Uruguay before our tour! Armed with a map he gave us, Colin and I set out for the main square in Concepcion, and the main shopping streets. There wasn’t too much to see in Concepcion – a funky art gallery/market that used to be a meat salting factory, some churches, and a university. We didn’t have our camera with us as we left our bags back at the tourist point, but there wasn’t too much to see. After a quick look around, a coffee, and a hot dog, we went back to the tourist office and loaded our bags into a car for the ride to Palacio San Jose. At the palace there were no English-speaking guides, unfortunately there were also no real captions in English for any of the rooms or exhibits. Luckily, this ended up giving us a nice surprise! As we explored the rooms, Colin and I discovered that we could actually read, translate, and understand the majority of Spanish language descriptions on the signs! I guess we had learned more Spanish than we thought already!
Palacio San Jose was the home of Justo Jose de Urquiza. Urquiza served as the President of Argentina from 1854 to 1860 at a shaky time at the start of Argentina’s history, when the region was divided into provinces instead of operating as a single country. Specifically, the region of Argentina around Buenos Aires was run separately from the area north of Buenos Aires. This Buenos Aires province was run by Juan Manuel de Rosas, who gave power to Urquiza to govern the Entre Rios province. Urquiza eventually rebelled and removed Rosas from power, and while he was in power himself, had the Palacio San Jose built as his personal residence, and as a place to bring foreign diplomats. The palace was designed by an Italian architect using details imported from Europe such as Italian marble and French works. As Colin and I walked around the garden and palace’s 38 rooms, these features became evident to us.
The first area we explored were the extensive palace gardens, built in 1857 and designed by a Uruguayan artist named Juan Manuel Blanes. Numerous busts in Italian marble were displayed throughout the gardens, including one of Urquiza himself. There were multiple other statues of important historical figures including – Alexander the Great, Julius Cesar, Napoleon, and Herman Cortez. Using dramatic mode on our camera, we got some interesting shots of the busts!
To the side of the garden there was a trail leading out to a man-made lake of 20,000 square meters, with a depth of 5 meters. Back when the power was at this palace there was a steam boat named San Cipriano that ran on the lake as well, but we didn’t see anything left of a boat. Colin and I walked down it to the end, where there were a few birds walking around. Around the lake here we saw where some underground pipes had been buried, which provided water to the house. The palace was the first building in Argentina to have running water!
Walking back from the lake we found the first sets of rooms in the palace. These including the servant’s quarters and the ‘garage’ so-to-speak which contained carriages. Past these the hall opened up onto a five hundred square meter patio, known as the vine arbor patio. This patio received its name from the vine support cast in metal around the patio, and there were 17 different rooms surrounding it including a large kitchen, offices for Urquiza and his men, along with plenty of bedrooms. The kitchen was interesting in its shape, being octagonal, and included three ovens and four burners for cooking up food for the political leaders in the palace. I found out from the Palacio San Jose website that the ovens each had special mechanisms within them that regulated their intake of air, allowing for specific cooking temperatures to be set.
We also found some rooms in this area which included a copy of the constitution of Argentina and explained the history of Argentina, highlighting Urquiza’s time, which I’ll summarize for you here. The timeline explained that Argentina was originally inhabited by multiple nomadic (yet some did settle to grow maize) tribal groups including the Yamana in the south and the Guarani in the northeast. When the Spanish arrived in 1536 looking for gold and silver they struggled, fighting against the tribes for domination of the territory eventually founding Buenos Aires in 1580.
The seeds were planted for independence from Spain for Argentina in 1776 when Buenos Aires was announced as the new capital of the area. At this time the Spanish placed trade restrictions on the locals which eventually led to a revolt against Spanish power when independence was declared in 1816. After independence was won, an internal struggle for power among the provinces began. Buenos Aires struggled against those provinces outside the capital in a civil war, with Juan Manuel de Rosas eventually centralizing control of the nation in the 1830’s through his use of military might and a secret police force known as the mazorca (‘ear of corn’) organized by his wife. Rosas essentially held a dictatorship for 17 years, operating to gain centralized control over Argentina while posing as a promoter of the Argentine provinces’ independence.
Urquiza had experience in using military force to achieve his goals, having become powerful in his province using it while serving under Rosas as governor of the Entre Rios province. Urquiza ended up revolting against Rosas, leading a group of Uruguayans, Argentines, and Brazilians against Rosas and overthrowing him in 1852 at the Battle of Monte Caseros. Rosas fled to England (however he is now buried in Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires) to escape Urquiza’s wrath. In 1853, Urquiza became the new dictator of Argentina, giving himself the power to regulate activity between the provinces. Urquiza ran a convention which created a new constitution for a united Argentina in 1853 (an action to which Rosas always had been opposed) which we saw a copy of in the historical archive room. Urquiza had to continuously fight and negotiated with the Buenos Aires province on matters related to the national constitution.
He reopened Argentinean ports to world trade by working up an agreement with Western powers, thus setting the stage for Argentina to become a rich nation. Money and immigrants followed from Europe, seeking a better life. However many of these immigrants and their decedents would only get sucked into urban poverty which was not to be seriously address until Peron in the 1950s, as we’ll explore later once in the capital.
Urquiza left the presidency in 1860, remaining on as the governor of Entre Rios province. Unfortunately for Urquiza, the battle and ill-will between the provinces was not gone. Just one year later in 1861, Buenos Aires and the other provinces were fighting again, Buenos Aires not happy with the compromises they had to make for the national constitution’s establishment. Buenos Aires ended up victorious, winning the Battle of Pavon. The end result for Urquiza was that he (along with his two sons) was eventually assassinated by political rivals at the Palacio San Jose. His wife had a death mask created of him, basically a mold of his face, which is now on display at the palace. We also saw a rag stained with his blood on display in the very room Urquiza was killed in – quite morbid!
Once we had finished at the palace, Colin and I found our driver and he brought us back to the bus station. Unfortunately this is where we found out some new information we had neglected to ask before… when was the next bus to Buenos Aires? Even though we had arrived at the bus station around 4:00 pm, assuming we would be able to jump on a bus straight away, there were no buses leaving until after 8:00 pm that evening. The bus station was tiny, freezing cold, and there was no real safe place to wait around or store our bags. Plus we had arranged with another couchsurfing friend in Buenos Aires to arrive that evening, and we didn’t want to arrive too late into BA and risk upsetting him! Instead of taking the 8:00 pm bus (which would have put us in BA around 1:00 am) I thought quickly and spoke with limited Spanish to the bus operators. I found out that in just a few minutes there was a bus going south towards BA to Gualeguaychu. I remembered this town was closer to BA than we were now, and with a few more questions, figured out Colin and I could go to Gualeguaychu straight away, then connect once we got there to an onward bus to BA. We would still get in late (maybe 11:00 pm) but at a slightly more reasonable time. We jumped on the bus, had a light dinner in the Gualeguaychu bus station upon arrival, and got to BA and our couchsurfer’s place without a problem. Mission accomplished! Now for the capital.
More soon,
Francesca
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