Vacations in Córdoba: Alta Gracia

On our fourth day in Córdoba, we took a short trip to Alta Gracia, a town less than 40 km from the provincial capital.

Alta Gracia is most famous for being the home of Ernesto Che Guevara during his childhood and youth (after his family moved in from Rosario, looking for a climate better suited to Ernesto's asthma). It was originally a Jesuit town, so there's also a Jesuit church and mission, and other signs of the presence of these enterprising religious order. And it's the place where the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla came to rest during the last four years of his life.

It's a quiet town, with an abundance of simple, sturdy white houses along meandering streets; parts of it climb into the surrounding hills, full of green. A stream runs through the western, older part of town.

We arrived before noon after a one-hour trip from Córdoba City and discovered that the bus terminal lacked an information booth. We had passed the busy touristic part, and now we had no maps, no-one to point us to where we should go. I found a large map glued to the inside of an empty office, and took pictures of it. After a long while, following the zoomed image in my camera's screen, we got to the closest marked spot, the Manuel de Falla Museum.

This was a good way to start the day, because the museum was wonderful. De Falla moved to Argentina in 1939, after the Spanish Civil War, and to Alta Gracia in 1942, looking for peace and quiet — and I'm sure he got plenty. The house he rented was designed specifically for the needs of the sick, with plenty of natural lighting in all the rooms, and a gallery to spend the day in the sun.

De Falla had a chronic condition and this was exactly what he needed. After his sister became a widow, she took care of him, while he worked on the cantata Atlántida, which he never finished. He died in 1946. His remains were taken back to Spain by request of the dictator Francisco Franco. De Falla was a very devout Catholic and a lover of things traditional and Spanish, so Franco viewed him as ideologically OK. We don't know how De Falla he felt about Franco, but he sure didn't like his intellectual friends being murdered or forced into exile for political reasons, and his country torn apart by war; that and the ensuing solitude and desperation, according to the museum's guide, was the reason why he moved to Argentina, where he had played concerts before. He was buried in the cathedral of Cádiz, his city of birth, and his personal effects were taken to Spain, but decades later many of them were brought back to Alta Gracia.

After this nice tour, we followed the map to the home of Che Guevara. The contrast couldn't have been greater. Where the De Falla museum was peacefully empty, quiet and unassuming, Guevara's childhood home was full of noisy, rude tourists, stuffed with souvenirs and trinkets, all of it recognizable from a block away. I hated every moment I stayed in there. Besides the many photographs, there was nothing of interest except a replica of the famed motorcycle (the one in The Motorcycle Diaries).

At the porch there was a very badly done bronze statue of little Ernesto for the tourists to take pictures beside it, and an equally horrible bust of Guevara in a corner. Granted, this was the peak hour of the busiest weekend in the whole tourist season, so you might find fewer people at other times, and if you really appreciate Guevara you may be inspired by his lingering presence in this place while there's no-one stepping on your toes. But Guevara didn't actually do anything here.

Next we looked for a place to eat lunch. It was the hottest time of day. Once the sun went down a bit, we went back to the stream and spent some more time there, just relaxing. Then we dragged ourselves to the Jesuit historical core.

The Jesuits weren't people to just come and build a church. They built whole towns around their churches. It's all a World Heritage Site now. The church is surprisingly well preserved, as are the courtyards and galleries around it.

In front of it there's the Tajamar, a wall that the Jesuits used to dam the stream and create a reservoir for their water needs. Nowadays the water level at the Tajamar is usually low, the water is green and stagnant and covered with plants, although it surprisingly doesn't stink. Birds live around it, and people fish in it too. It's a nice sight when the sun goes down and the ancient buildings and the trees are reflected in the surface.

And that was the end of our visit to Alta Gracia, and probably the best day in our vacations. We took the bus right there beside the Tajamar and arrived back in Córdoba as night settled in.

San Ignacio and Santa Ana

On my last day in Posadas I took the trip everybody comes to Posadas for, which is the Jesuit-Guarani missions (known to many as the Jesuit missions, but it was the Guaraníes who actually did the hard work, so...). There are three missions near Posadas: Santa Ana, Loreto and San Ignacio. They're associated to modern towns of the same name, but in San Ignacio the mission (called San Ignacio Miní) is merely on the edge of the town, a few blocks from the main square, while in Santa Ana the modern town is located a couple of kilometers away from the ruins of Nuestra Señora de Santa Ana. Moreover, both San Ignacio and Santa Ana are close to the main road (National Route 12), while Loreto is 3 km away into the countryside. I started in San Ignacio and had to skip Loreto because it would've taken me more than I expected, and I wanted to be back in Posadas before it was too dark.

There are special tours to the missions. You get ripped off and carried away with a fancy guide and all that. I asked about that first, but I was told it was a stupid thing to do — better do your own homework. So I took the bus to the Posadas terminus, and then got on another bus to San Ignacio. It was very cold and cloudy, but not raining. I told the bus driver to drop me off in front of the church, which is where most people get off anyway; then I did a 15-minute tour of the town and then headed for the ruins. San Ignacio is pleasantly small and calm. The ruins are located 300 or 400 m from the main square. At that point you're greeted by a profusion of places to eat, drink, gamble and sleep, and by a lot of people trying to sell you cheap quality books and memorabilia of the mission. You walk 250 meters farther, and you find the entrance to the historical site.

You pay AR$7.50 (good for the three missions if you decide to visit them all and keep the ticket), and you get in. Once inside, you're free to walk and wander by yourself as long as you don't break or move or try to set anything on fire. I did that, took a million pictures, then joined a group with a guide and did the tour again. There was a middle-aged couple of rosarinos with a kid who asked a lot of questions (curious, clever kid, if only just a bit bothersome) and a couple of New Yorkers that I met again later in Santa Ana.

Now, as Borges would say, comes the difficult part of my story, because there are some things you can't just describe in words but only if the other person has shared the experience. San Ignacio Miní was founded in the early 17th century and endured until the last quarter of the 18th, when a jealous Spanish Crown delivered the Jesuits to the Portuguese established in Brazil, who came upon the mission towns, burned them down and forced their indigenous inhabitants to flee or become slaves. The remains of the Jesuit-Guaraní town, which once housed up to 4,000 people, are now scattered blocks of stone, worn down over four centuries by the elements of a fierce subtropical climate. The parts of the mission not devoured by the forest are still imposing and hint at a great organization and an unmatched industriousness. Imagine yourself being sent to win the minds and souls of thousands of warring natives of a faraway land who speak a language like no other known on Earth, and get them to become sedentary and to build a town of hardwood and stone in the middle of the forest, and raise cattle and harvest yerba mate..., and even attend church every Sunday. The Jesuits did it, and the Guaraní cooperated. When they were scattered, they knew a lot of manual skills and were organized; many escaped to other settlements, towns and cities far away, and changed their names to Spanish-sounding ones, and their trace was lost. Yet Guaraní is still spoken by many in Misiones and Corrientes, and Guaraní words still pepper our very own Rioplatense dialect.

Let the proverbial pictures speak more than several thousand words...

The mission of Santa Ana is not as grand as San Ignacio. The tour guide, however, made up for it with a great history lesson. As it often happens in not-so-popular places, the guy in charge had more time to chat, to answer to common and unexpected questions, and even to hear about things I had to say. Before, however, I ventured into the ruins by myself, and was surprised to find, by the remains of the church, a humble modern-looking cemetery.

The guide was talking to a foreign-looking couple. I approached them and joined the tour. The two visitors were from New York City; he understood some Spanish, she almost nothing. The guy told me his Spanish was no good in Argentina, and he was really having trouble coping with the fast-paced Mesopotamic Argentine Spanish of our guide, who spoke almost no English. I remained silent at first, until the dialogue came to a halt when the tour guide tried to explain the religious beliefs of the Guaraníes about an afterlife paradise land — paradisíaco was too long and too complex a word for the NYer. After several minutes of me not speaking a word in English, my interjection, "heavenly place!", startled the rest of the group a bit... After that I turned into a last-resort translator for a while. I enjoyed it — practise for my English, and conversation after days of sleeping in an isolated cabin and eating alone in strange places.

Santa Ana, we learned, was founded in the same wave of colonization as San Ignacio, and suffered the same fate. It was only the resistance of the Jesuits and the Guaraní combined that kept these lands from becoming part of Brazil or, later, of Paraguay. The guide noted, quite appropriately, that Misiones is and looks exactly like a wedge between the territories of those two countries. After the Revolution of May 1810, many parts of Argentina were left to their own devices. The Spanish were beaten, and the local political leaders (caudillos) became lords of their separate provinces, but in some places there was simply no-one, or no-one left. Misiones is part of Argentina, probably, because of a combination of luck and the fact that there were not enough troops to deal with such large borders as those of Argentina and Brazil... and of course, because whatever had flourished there had reverted to subtropical jungle in a matter of years.

The cemetery had a nice story as well. When modern Santa Ana was founded, the people recognized the religious value of the Jesuit mission's holy ground, and started burying their dead in the old Jesuit cemetery (on top, we assume, of previous native burials). In many cases, the poor had no money to build a proper tomb and just piled up stones taken from the ancient walls of the mission church. They continued to use the cemetery until 1980, when the municipality of Santa Ana opened up a new one closer to the town and offered the land for the remains buried in the mission. However, the cost of moving the bodies was not included, so many people left their relatives where they were buried, and even today they came to visit the graves to the mission.

As you can see in the pictures, the sun got out at least briefly while I was in Santa Ana. Alas, it wasn't to last, but it made for better contrast, and brought some welcome warmth to an afternoon that was getting cold fast.

I missed Loreto, but I couldn't have done it in what was left of the day. It's still winter and the sun sets fast, and I still had to catch a bus to Posadas, and another one from the bus station to my cabin, and get something to eat. I had to prepare my stuff for the next step of my journey, the Capital of the Forest — Oberá.