The Victoria's legacy (Villa Ocampo - San Isidro)

The last sunbeams light the recently roughcasted façade. The fine gravels grate under the steps of the last walkers. In the alleys, under the shade of secular ombus or araucarias, benches offer ultimate moments of confidences to the ones in love, before they plunge in the city's hubbub. Come to contemplate the works of art exposed inside the property or to enjoy the freshness of the park drawn by Don Manuel Ocampo (father of Victoria), the occasional visitor could not imagine that the roof of this beautiful residence was devastated 3 years earlier by a terrible fire, whereas began works of its restoration. The will, the passion of a team (*) placed under the supervision of UNESCO allowed that survive the house of the one who "dedicated her fortune, ... considerable, to the education of her country and of her continent". Borges added besides on a purely personal basis: "…I owe a great deal to Victoria, but as an Argentine, I owe her far more."
Victoria had moved definitively into this house in 1942. Prestigious names of the world of arts had crossed its threshold for a long time already. They had come there to seek the calm favourable to the inspiration. They had found there the fascination this woman exerted, become little by little their muse and their protectress.
Rabindranath Tagore wrote at the end of his life that he "did not know her language but the words spoken by her eyes will endure forever, so eloquent in their anguish.”. Hermann Keyserling acknowledged that he "(had been) enslaved by the most spiritual woman (he) had ever met.”
But the most beautiful homage was that of Borges little after the death of Victoria, in 1979: "She lived with valor and decorum, her own life... She possessed, ...the grace that heaven didn’t deign offer me".

Ramona Victoria Epifanía Rufina Ocampo, called Victoria Ocampo (1890-1979)

Villa Ocampo Project
www.villaocampo.org

(*) Special thanks to Neda Ferrier (Villa Ocampo project- UNESCO) to have allowed me to discover this place.

The Pueyrredon house in San Isidro (Pcia de Bs As)

1806: Benefitting from the deliquescence of the Spanish Crown (see article on the Argentina national Day), Englishes, who on several occasions expressed their interest for this colony, unload on banks of Rio of Plata.
An army of 5000 men placed under the command of the General Beresford , takes possession of the town of Buenos Aires, deserted by the representative of King of Spain, the viceroy Sobremonte, who fled towards Cordoba with the royal treasure.

Although badly organized, English expedition settles in the city without meeting great resistances. Assured of its forces, it does not suspect that a threat is profiled on the other side of Rio.
Indeed, a French adventurer named Santiago de liniers raises a small army to Montevideo. He crosses the river Uruguay in Colonia and head for Buenos Aires while skirting it.
formed on a 29 year old Creole initiative, inhabitant of the Acassuso district of San Isidro (in the North-West of Buenos Aires). This young man who will play an important part thereafter at the time of the declaration of Independence of Argentina (1815), is named Juan Martin Pueyrredon.
The junction made with the troops of Linen near San Isidro, Pueyrredon, to whom the French has just given the title of “Commandante General de los Voluntarios de Caballeria Ligera ", enters with him in Buenos Aires. Profiting from the population support, they will retake, district by district, house by house, the city until the surrender of Englishes.
In the garden of the Pueyrredon house, stand a tree where few years later, Pueyrredon and San Martin will have a crucial talk for the creation of the Argentinian nation.

Buenos Aires gardens in springtime

Escapade to Tigre (Pcia de Bs As)

A few kilometres from Buenos Aires, at the North-West of the city, is the town of Tigre : more exactly at the mouth of the rivers Paraguay and Parana. Place astonishing and completely disorientating for Europeans we are. If the town of Buenos Aires is inspired, by its urban architecture, from the European and North-American megalopoles, Tigre plunges us in the middle of South America: that of large forests, multicoloured huts drawn up on their piles, hardly emerging from a choking and luxuriant vegetation.
In the middle of the tentacular roots, the rivers seek a passage to emerge in Rio, formed by hundreds of arm (streams), in a delta which does not have anything to envy the bayou of Louisiana. During November 2005, we had visited this place under an overpowering heat, a deep blue sky: we had returned dazzled from there. We are gone back there this time whereas the storm threatened. Result: a completely different vision, but always same fascination.