Escapade to San Lorenzo

Just came back from San Lorenzo, where I indulged in my photographic vice... San Lorenzo is some 25 km north of Rosario, at the northern end of the metropolitan area, and is a lovely city (pop. 43,000+). As it often happens, it's so close to home that I hadn't visited it since I was a child.

Back in 1813 Argentina was starting to fight for its independence from Spain, and it was there in San Lorenzo that General (then only Colonel) José de San Martín first engaged Spanish royalist forces. The "armies" were minuscule and the battle was short, but it was an important battle. The battlesite is now called Campo de la Gloria (Glory Field) and there's this monument there:

(The ugly fence is there to cut vandalism. Otherwise the monument would be covered in graffiti. Argentinians will spray-paint anything.) At the time of the battle San Lorenzo was a small town but Rosario wasn't much better -- it only had 3,000 inhabitants. Moreover, in San Lorenzo there was a Franciscan monastery, which dated back from the mid-18th century:

The friars at the San Carlos Convent received San Martín's forces and then, after the battle, let them treat the wounded. The friars are still there, but most of the monastery is now a museum, including the small plot in an inner yard where some of them are buried. You just pay 2 pesos and a Grenadier in uniform guides you through the old monastic cells, including the one where San Martín stayed. I took like 50 pictures inside, but this, like most museums, suffers from a lighting problem -- it's very difficult to get your pictures right, with everything shielded behing glasses which kill pictures taken with a flash, and unless you have some supernatural means to stay ab-so-lute-ly still for a 2-second exposure time.