Colin and I decided to head to Cordoba next. While planning our trip around Argentina in Buenos Aires, we found ourselves conflicted – go to Cordoba at the beginning, or on the way down to Patagonia. The city’s position smack in the middle of the country made it stand out a bit in our plan. Since it wasn’t a city to be missed being the second largest (1.3 million+ people) in Argentina, we decided later was the best way to go. Therefore we ended up stopping in this city at one of the best times to be there – Halloween! A college town home to the National University of Cordoba (the oldest university in Argentina) with plenty of young people, bars, and clubs… we knew it would be a good place to have a fun party for the night of the living dead!
Our bus arrived in Cordoba the morning of October 31st, after a long journey taking us back through La Rioja. Thankfully our host Matias was empathetic to our bus journey and had a great space for us to rest. It rained throughout the day, but we did manage to get out later in the afternoon and see some of the city. We started with a little Halloween celebration – lunch out, at a Halloween-themed café complete with scary masks, hanging ghosts, and spiders and skeletons surrounding our table! A juicy (delicious) burger and some (average) nachos filled us up!
Since we were in a college town, our first get-to-know Cordoba experience was a tour of the National University of Cordoba, founded by the Jesuits in 1613. Our group was met by an enthusiastic guide named Maximilliano who first took us into the Jesuit church adjoining the school. We sat down in the pews while he walked us through the university’s history, from a humble beginning surviving on donations and with no authority to give degrees to students. Our guide told us that there are more than 100,000 undergraduate and graduate students studying at the National University of Cordoba – which really explains the young vibe of the city! He also showed us different architecture (including cedar brought 1000 kilometers from Paraguay on mules) in the Jesuit church which made it feel really eclectic.
Our next destination was the Jesuit library, which had hundreds of old books inside, pretty well preserved, which were some of the oldest printed books and pocket books in the world. Part of the collections contained old maps (from 1529-1890) of South America which had a massive Paraguay, a much smaller Brazil, a Bolivia with coastline, and lots of different ‘versions’ of the Patagonia border depicted. Because of their fragility we weren’t able to take any photos, but we were told students were in the process of digitalizing all of the maps and books in the collection. This included a huge bible (one of 3 in the world) which was designed for educational purposes – the religious text was printed in multiple languages (7 different ones!) so students could compare and contrast the words, hopefully deriving a more ‘full’ religious meaning from the process.
There was also a beautifully ornate room called the “Hall of Graduation” where students had their final oral thesis exams for the last few hundred years. We were told that only those of pure Spanish blood (with documented proof of this) had been able to study at the school in the past – and their tutor had to declare his statement confirming the students’ claim. There were many chairs set up in the room for the tutor, the dean, the ‘approval’ board, and the public audience… but the student had to stand for his test for 8 hours a day over an intense 3 day period. During the exam, the student was questioned harshly. If the student failed, it was considered his tutor had failed him as well. If the student passed and successfully graduated, he celebrated by riding a donkey around the city. A more modern celebration for Cordoba University graduates is having eggs, flour, and cereal thrown on them once their thesis is approved. After having your thesis approved and finally being done with schoolwork, I guess you are so happy you don’t care anymore!
Cordoba’s “young vibe” is not just held in its academic focus. There is a lot of art in the city as well! We found some of this at the brightly-lit Cultural Center of Cordoba, which treated Colin and I to weird and colorful modern art and a light and music water show!
My favorite building (which gave us some fantastically dramatic photos) in Cordoba was the one we visited next – a Franciscan church named Iglesia de los Capuchinos. This church had beautiful neo-Gothic architecture but only one 53 meter tall steeple. It is said that the church was completed with only one steeple purposefully because the incompleteness represents the “imperfections in humanity.” Alternatively, another theory claims that the missing steeple represents matter which perishes and the completed steeple represents the soul which ascends to heaven. Our guess (the third theory, which makes a bit more sense) is that they just ran out of money to finish building the church!
There was a service on at the church, so after a quick peak inside we headed back to our host’s home to share a delivery pizza with him and his friend –but not before getting soaked in the rain!
The morning of November 1st, we attempted to visit a couple of art museums in Cordoba. I had read on TripAdvisor that not all of the museums are open frequently, in fact, many of them seem to close for extended periods of time at random. Once we got to the area we confirmed this to be true. We were told by one museum that it takes them 10 days every time they need to change one of the monthly exhibits, and they close the entire museum for those 10 days. How inefficient… we did manage to get into the Evita Fine Arts Museum housed in the Ferreyra Palace. After paying the fee and entering the first room the lights promptly went out. We were told to move to the main hall of the museum (for safety?) until the lights came back on. Just as we were about to get our money back and leave the lights came back… and we explored instead.
The art museum included paintings on the brutal dictatorship in Argentina, which had many paintings showing a woman being raped by “the government.” I can’t say we liked those paintings much – we hurried on instead to these little mini art pieces by Cesar Augusto Petit Bon which were much nicer!
After all this (again, a lot of it strange) art we were ready for something a little more straightforward. Science! There was a little museum we planned to see which was part of the National University of Cordoba. The first thing we were greeted with was a giant sloth!
Around the corner from the giant sloth there was a “clock of the Earth” and a “clock of Life” giving a good indication of when things occurred on the planet. They really showed how long there was “nothing” before life, and then life on Earth, just exploded! The exhibit was really interesting showing us examples of some mega fauna we had seen before (such as glyptodonts) and some new creatures such as the tiny (just 40 centimeters long!) archosaur Marasuchus Lilloensis, which are closer to birds than to crocodiles. Archosaurs (a group I had never heard of before!) are creatures which have a combination of bird and reptile features, which includes the now extinct dinosaurs. scientists have classified archosaurs mainly on the basis of their ankles. They are classified by the presence of their “primitive mesotarsal” ankles which bent in a ‘peg and socket’ style movement.
One of the best items in the museum was the fossil from San Luis province of Argentina of what was long believed to be the largest spider that ever existed, megarachne servinei. Its’ name even means huge spider! However in 2005 a more complete fossil was found and after study researchers concluded that the megarachne servinei was actually a large eurypterid… not a spider, but a sea scorpion. So here is a photo of me posting with the largest sea scorpion ever!
There was also a little exhibit on the route of paper over time and throughout the world. The best part about this exhibit was a discovery we made at the very end. The paper in the guestbook was really old! There were signatures from the early 1900’s on it! It was cool to see how long it had been in use… and our names now join them. 
Finished with our science education, we headed to a nearby mall and had some Subway sandwiches for lunch. We then started our quest for tickets for the Halloween event (on the Saturday after Halloween, November 2nd) I hoped to see: El Pungo, put on by El Pungo pub every year outside Cordoba. While we checked for information at the information center (they gave us incorrect information that it was sold out) we ended up coming back to the mall to book the tickets. Later on in the day we booked some transportation for the party as well.
Bouncing back to art from science, we visited another strange art museum called Museo Genaro Pérez. At least it was free! (We needed that, after spending a bunch on El Pungo tickets and transport!) This one had a bunch of creepy Halloween-themed paintings and a larger exhibit called “Magico and Extrano” or “Magic and Strange.”
Our host Matias invited us that evening to join him for an asado at his friend Sebas’ home. This meant cooking a massive lamb, enough to feed a lot of people, which is how many came for the party! We got to spend some time talking with local Argentines, a lot of them students or former students of the city university, and trying their home-cooking! This cooking included a traditional Argentine picada, which is a platter of cured meats and cheeses for everyone to share. I’m quite used to this coming from an Italian family, we do the same thing! This one however included blood sausage, which I did try! This was followed later on by the lamb, home-made chimichurri sauce, a Russian salad, other salads and veg, and plenty of warm breads. Of course it wasn’t complete without local Quilmes beer and bottles of Malbec wine! What a nice treat.
The morning of November 2nd we slept in for a while, knowing we had a big night ahead of us. The party at El Pungo Halloween Festival was the 20 year anniversary of what is the largest Halloween celebration in Argentina. The party was supposed to go from 7:00 pm in the evening to 7:00 am in the morning. That’s a lot of partying. We still needed some last-minute (we are traveling after all!) Halloween costumes for the party however, and Colin managed to find the perfect thing! After another nap in the afternoon, we donned our outfits and I did some make-up (not so easy in a bumping bus!) and we were on our way to the party. The transport to El Pungo we booked took ages – and was really reckless. Pretty much everyone on the bus was standing up in the aisles, and most of the party-goers were already drunk. The bus also made numerous stops for alcohol, so we didn’t get there for 3 hours.
Once we arrived we were nevertheless some of the first guests there! Colin and I took some photos with our costumes on, and walked around ‘judging’ to ourselves who had the best outfits. We even took pictures of/with some of the better costumes! There were 3 huge tents with different music playing in each of them (electronic music, 80’s and 90’s, and Argentine/Latin music) not including the VIP room we also had access to… this splurge was the best idea! The VIP room had tons of nice couches to sit on when not dancing, its own DJ playing great music, lots of little snacks coming around for munching, and we each got to try 5 different vodka or Fernet-based drinks. It was our little hideaway when we weren’t dancing in one of the other tents! We were pretty thankful we had included the transportation once the celebration was over – it made it much easier to get ourselves back to Cordoba.
By the time we arrived back to our host’s place the morning (8:00 am!) of November 3rd, he had already left to go hiking with some friends. We slept pretty much the entire day, exhausted from a great evening out. It wasn’t until November 4th that we left for exploring again – a daytrip to Alta Gracia, about an hour and a half outside of Cordoba. There were two things we were interested in seeing here, and the first was one of Che’s Guevara’s childhood homes with an exhibit about his upbringing.
We learned at the museum (and from watching The Motorcycle Diaries afterwards) that Che suffered from asthma as a child, and his parents moved around to try and find a good place with the right air for his upbringing. The house in Alta Gracia is one of the places they lived. Each of the rooms contained different memorabilia about Che’s life, the best being the motorcycle he used to drive around South America on his adventures which radicalized him and led to his future in the Cuban Revolution. There were also tons of photos: Che as a young boy, a medical student, and later as a revolutionary leader. The museum even had a short video about his childhood we got to watch, which had all his childhood friends saying he was a leader even in the past with them!
The other point of interest in Alta Gracia was a Jesuit church and estancia or farm, which was one of 6 estancias operated by the Jesuits in the 1600 and 1700’s in order to support the Nacional University of Cordoba before it was nationalized by the government. Unfortunately it was closed the day we went there (Mondays) so we only got some photos of the outside. There was a school next door we went into though which was built at the same time, so we got a feel for the architecture anyways! I did learn an interesting fact about the farm – the current Pope Francis used to live there!
That evening we left on an overnight bus back to the western side of Argentina. It was time for more wine in Mendoza!
Francesca
