Either Side of the River: Santa Fe & Parana

On the 5th of September, Colin and I woke in the morning for one last breakfast with our couchsurfing hosts, Carolina and Eric. We ended up at the bus station for a bus just before 1:00 pm, which would put us into Santa Fe around 3:30 pm. Thankfully it was not a long bus journey this time! Santa Fe and Parana are two cities we decided might be worth a couple of days, especially as they are two cities are separated only by a 1 hour drive through the Hernandarias Subfluvial Tunnel. Both cities are quite small by most standards, with populations of just a couple hundred thousand people each. Our next host, Lucas, was a short walk from the Santa Fe bus station and we managed to lug our bags to his place and he welcomed us inside. It was quite late in the day already, but due to siesta many museums and attractions are open late in Argentina. Lucky for us! After some quick rough planning, we went to the microcenter of the city in search of something interesting.

The microcenter consisted of the ‘old’ part of Santa Fe which had buildings built as far back as the early 1600’s! The first of these we explored was the Convento de Santo Domingo. This church and convent area was where General Belgrano prepared and organized his march to Paraguay- now the church contains remnants of men who were distinguished in their fields in centuries past. Although this church made for a couple cool pictures, the main place we were headed was in the square Plaza Alvear: the 17th century Convent San Francisco.

The Convent San Francisco didn’t seem like much at first, but as we read the description of the building’s architecture we realized the interesting part of the convent was in the details. The walls were extremely thick, approximately 1 meters thick, and they contained numerous different materials that had been mud plastered and whitewashed over. In the church itself there was a roof with ornate Paraguayan cedar woodwork and a beautiful construction that included no nails, just wooden spikes. 

We didn’t have much time before things started closing in the center, so we hurried up to see the Museu Historical Provincial, which was housed in what was formerly the house of a man named Diez de Andino. This house is now a great example of colonial architecture in the area during the 17th century. There wasn’t too much to see in the house because quite a few of the rooms were closed off, but there was a wall which provided a look into the previous stonework structure of the house. The rest of the displays had old mate cups, old pianos, and some old religious artwork produced by indigenous Guaraní people at one of the Jesuit missions.      

Our last museum of the evening was by far our favorite in Santa Fe: the Ethnographic Museum. Straight away when we got there we noticed a little Gaucho display with a large horse… next to the horse were a few little chairs obviously made out of the bones of horses! The main room of the museum went in chronological order, displaying old artifacts and artwork – even going back as far to display old mega fauna fossils and some ancient rhea eggs that had fossilized!      

In the center of the room were a few models of Old Santa Fe, as the city looked back in the beginning of the 1600’s. The model showed us where buildings used to be, including the old cabildo (the old city hall – now where the governor's house we entered previously stands), the house of the city’s founder Juan de Garay, and many of the old churches we had been in that afternoon.

There was also a display of feathered headpieces, carrying vessels, and other items belonging to indigenous native groups that used to live in the Northeast of Argentina in the pampido or Gran Chaco region, collectively known as the “Guaycurues.” Unfortunately, this is not the name the group gave to themselves, but was in fact an offensive nickname meaning “savage” given to them by the Guarani. There were approximately 150,000 people living in the pampido region and at its’ largest, the group controlled parts of Brazil, Bolivia, and the North of Argentina.

The displays went through the different tribes in the Guaycurue group which included the Mocovi, Tuff, Pilaga, Caduveo, Abipones, Mbayaes, and Payaguaes peoples – the latter three groups are extinct. It focused on one group in particular, the Mocovies. The Mocovies occupied the Chaco region, who was described and documented by the Jesuit Father Paucke Florian who established a mission for the group. The group were originally hunters, gatherers, and warriors – but after the Europeans arrived they began to work on missions and in mills, making religious art instead of the feathered headpieces you see below.   

We started to get hungry once we finished this museum, and after a quick photo op at a building which seemed like it was a city hall, we found a nice little place to eat where we ordered grilled chicken and pasta. Delicious treat before heading back to our host’s apartment for some well-deserved rest!  

The next morning we decided to cross the river to Parana. Parana is the capital of the Entre Rios province, just as Santa Fe is the capital of the Santa Fe province, and the city is also a river port. Since our host’s brother was leaving early in the morning (the keys are needed to open the door from both the inside and outside here in Northern Argentina, such a fire hazard and so annoying!) we headed out when he did at 7:00 am. This meant we could catch an early bus to Parana and get started while the day was still somewhat cool. It only took an hour to get there and just after 8:00 in the morning we found ourselves sitting down to a buffet breakfast in a hotel. Great traveler’s tip: hotel buffets will usually let you join at a minimal price. Perfect if you are super hungry and in a rush to see the city.

While in Parana we wandered around, with a list of a few museums and stores to go into but not much on the list to do. Especially because the whole place closed for siesta at noon! (When it is 100 degrees F out, what else can you do?) The first place we ended up going inside (besides the massive Cathedral of Paraná in the photo above) was a little artisan market with some strange things for sale… 

The next few museums were very tiny and with little to no explanation about the contents. So I can’t tell you very much! Moreover, we weren’t really encouraged to stay too long in any of the museums. Because we were obviously English-speaking tourists (and the only tourists in the whole city I believe!) we got tons of attention in each of the museums we went inside. While the museum attendants were well meaning, it quickly became pretty exhausting to try and have conversations with new people in our extremely limited Spanish and their virtually non-existent English every 15 minutes or so as we bounced between the little museums. It was nice that they tried, but it is like wanting to window-shop in the mall… sometimes you want to just do your own thing. The first museum we entered was the City Museum, where there was an exhibit on the ‘sister cities’ of Parana and some costumes which were copies of outfits in famous Hollywood movies. 

Our next quick stop was the Bellas Artes Museum, which had some local artists both old (from the early 1900’s) and new (recent photographs) pieces on display. While there were a few pretty cool paintings inside (and rather bizarre photographs) my favorite piece was the one taken by
Colin from the outside of the museum, shown below:

Here are some of the things we saw inside the art museum in Parana, the first pieces being part of the 22 piece collection by Cesareo Bernaldo de Quiros, a native Argentina painter from Gualeguay who was part of the post-impressionist school of art as his use of vivid colors and distorted images indicates. He is known for his works displaying images of gauchos and nature. The second set of artworks (the photographs) are strange images by an artist named Nicola. She had done dozens of large self-portrait photos for her collection… graphic images of herself posed with cow and pig carcasses. Colin and I wandered around the museum, heavy with our critique and comments about Nicola’s work – completely unaware that the artist was hiding around the corner. Once Colin informed me of this we stopped pretty much mid-sentence and raced out of there!   

We made our way to the Natural Sciences museum next where we found a bunch of (formerly alive) stuffed animals of the region including a giant anteater, a pygmy anteater, a sloth, a jaguar, condors, monkeys, armadillos, and tons of other birds and mammals. There was even a male lion and the head of a buffalo that was massive. At the same time we got to this first room, a group of schoolchildren came into the room. Or should I say, they ran into the room screaming at the top of their lungs. Shrill – ouch! Once they had settled down, Colin and I were able to take a closer look at by far the most ‘out there’ exhibit in the museum: a series of six baby fetuses at different stages of development sitting in preservation solutions. It was like something out of the famous ‘Bodies’ exhibit I saw once in New York.

 

My favorite creature we saw was called the pink fairy armadillo, which is the smallest species of armadillo with a fluffy underbelly and a hard armor shell on the top. This species are native to central Argentina and it lives nearby ant colonies in little burrows in dry grasslands and plains that are sandy, using its claws like a mole to ‘swim’ through the sand underground. It is so cute and I would love to see one in the wild – but this is unlikely because of how nocturnal these little guys are.    

 

The next section of the museum greeted us with a huge skeleton of a whale from 6,000 years ago. There were also numerous mega fauna bones and partial skeletons alongside drawings of what we imagine the creatures looked like. Some of these drawings have the pieces highlighted in red which the museum had on display such as the almost 3 meter long extinct Pliocene and Pleistocene era Toxodon, an indigenous South American large-hoofed mammal shown below which has an interesting story on their Wiki page which I’ll quote below:

 

“Charles Darwin was one of the first to collect Toxodon fossils, after paying 18 pence for a T. platensis skull from a farmer in Uruguay. In The Voyage of the Beagle Darwin wrote "November 26th - I set out on my return in a direct line for Monte Video. Having heard of some giant's bones at a neighboring farmhouse on the Sarandis, a small stream entering the Rio Negro, I rode there accompanied by my host, and purchased for the value of eighteen pence the head of an animal equaling in size that of the hippopotamus. Mr Owen in a paper read before the Geological Society, has called this very extraordinary animal, Toxodon, from the curvature of its teeth." (Toxodon Wiki Page)

 

Similar to other mega fauna such as the armadillo-like Glyptodons we learned about while in Uruguay, the Toxodon was liked hunted into extinction by early humans – arrow heads were found in some of the fossils. Since their size and shape was similar to a rhino or a hippo (but much larger at more than 3,000 lbs.,) these guys would have provided a lot of meat for early humans and would prove a prosperous kill.

There were a few more rooms which had some different insects (such as massive tarantulas) and indigenous artifacts, but these were pretty limited – just a few photos here and not much explanation to be had.

 

Once we finished in the science museum, we decided to conclude our time in Parana by walking around the nearby Park Urquiza, then getting some ice-cream and sitting down to cool off. (It was almost 100 degrees F out there by now!)   

Once we got back to Santa Fe it was already after 2:00 pm. We were scheduled to tour the Santa Fe Brewery at 5:00 pm on a public tour. It was so hot out that we decided to go there early, and we ended up sitting in the lobby with some water and cooling off for an hour and a half before our tour started. We sat next to a guy dressed in a business suit who was clearly there for a job interview and talked to him for a while before he went to do his interview – hopefully we helped distract him from being so nervous since he told us he had been waiting for more than an hour for his interview to begin! Shortly after he left, our tour began. Unfortunately the tour was only in Spanish, and there was no literature available in English at the factory, so the information I was able to get was pretty limited. But I’ll try and tell you what the factory was like!

The Santa Fe Brewery, we learned from a welcome introduction video, is in charge of the manufacture of many different beer brands including Santa Fe (the city’s own brand,) along with Schneider, Cordoba and Salta (local beers) and Corona, Budweiser, Heineken and Guinness (international beers.) In 1912 many European immigrants from Germany, Switzerland, Poland, etc. came to Argentina and, of course, they wanted something to drink! The waters of Santa Fe supposedly have properties that make them perfect for brewing beer. During this time a man named Otto Schneider introduced breweries and brewery patios to the region.           

 

The process of making beer at the Santa Fe Brewery is quite intensive – especially because the factory pumps out more than 270,000 gallons of beer per day. More than 600 bottles and 1000 cans per minute are produced and pasteurized. For all these cans and bottles, Santa Fe’s water, which has the best mineral content for making beer, is gathered and purified. The resulting fruity Santa Fe beer is mild and great, but more about that later. On to the factory!

 

In the first room we entered post-video, there were a bunch of huge super hot to the touch ‘upside down funnel’ shaped stainless steel containers. In these tanks the purified water of Santa Fe is combined with malted barley which is ground together and boiled (this substance is known as ‘wort.’) Eventually hops is added which is really the essence of the beer’s flavor. This concoction is then fermented by the yeast, and the natural sugars in the wort produce alcohol.

 

After walking past a huge room which smelled strongly of beer (as it was being brewed and carried through tubes all over from here) we went into a large warehouse-like space which had an assembly line of sorts going on. This was my favorite room in the factory! Although the guide was speaking only in Spanish, through some careful observation Colin and I managed to figure out that in this room recycled beer bottles were being refurbished and refilled. Crates of empty, used bottles would come down a moving belt, be picked up by one of two robots, then emptied onto the belt (neatly, of course, in straight rows) below. These belts would take the loose bottles to a machine which would clean and sanitize each bottle, stripping them of their former label during the process. Once the bottle was ‘useable,’ it was sent on another conveyor belt away from the room into another part of the factory. At this point the bottle is refilled with beer. The filled, cleaned, and capped bottles then come back into the warehouse on the conveyor belt and are relabeled by robots, which then re-crate the beer bottles. The filled crates are picked up by humans driving cargo machines, and loaded onto trucks.

While the robots did most of the heavy work, they weren’t perfect so obviously there is a need for human oversight. While we were watching the bottles, one of them fell over on the conveyor belt and blocked other bottles for a few seconds from proceeding down the line. While we thought someone would have to correct this manually, the machine must have been designed to account for this, and the weight of the other bottles eventually caused the fallen bottle to move out of the way. Throughout this whole process we saw numerous employees standing around looking at the machines and inspecting some of the bottles from the line. Colin told me later that he encountered a beer or two before which already had a chip on the bottle when he opened it, despite the bottle being closed and capped. We figured out that this may have come from the bottle having been refurbished in a process similar to the one we just saw – but perhaps with less oversight for chips!              

Towards the end of the visit we were all brought into the factory museum which had photos and old machines from the early 1900’s factory times. There was a little video which basically re-capped a lot of the history and information about the company we had already learned through sound effects and animation. At the end of the tour each person was given a little goody bag which contained a Spanish brochure about the brewery, along with 2 bottles of factory-produced beer (one Santa Fe and one Schneider) AND a voucher for one liso (a tall 8 ounce glass of beer and the common way to drink beer) of Santa Fe beer at the patio bar nearby. It was a clever way to get everyone to the patio around dinnertime and it worked for us – we ordered a delicious and fluffy ham and mushroom pizza along with our free beers. I really liked it! It was really light and slightly fruity and almost didn’t taste like beer… so perfect for a typical non-beer drinker like me.       

The next day we spent catching up with the blog and resting up. That evening we shared a farewell pizza (again!) with our couchsurfing host Lucas which was his own delicious creation of sliced up hotdogs and thick cheese. Lucas walked us near the bus station that evening after dinner, where Colin and I caught a 10:15 pm bus the evening of September 7th to our next destination!

Francesca