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Plaza de Mayo
The current day Plaza de Mayo coincides with the Plaza Mayor of the town once called Santísima Trinidad
(Holy Trinity), founded, and along with the port named Santa María de los Buenos Ayres, by Basque native Juan
de Garay in 1580. The lack of towering forts, cathedrals and cabildos (colonial city council) that the Spaniards
left in other future American capitals (for starters, Montevideo, located across the river) indicates that
Buenos Aires was a very poor settlement.
Plaza de Mayo is not the most beautiful plaza in all of America, but it is the most archetypical. There is no other
city in the world that has grown to such an extent in keeping with the founding Spanish model of 1OO-by-100
vara blocks (some 284 feet per side). On land with hardly any hills and no natural barriers, the urban area
has grown 50 miles from its original square in 425 years. It is also the most representative plaza of all
New World Republics, for no other American capital used and continues to use its plaza as much to act out
political and popular passions. Argentina's political tradition, since May 25, 1810, calls for all who wish
to be seen and heard to do so in the Plaza de Mayo. Groups include radicals of the times of Hipólito Yrigoyen,
descamisados ("shirtless") from the beginning of Peronism, labor unions, mothers and grandmothers of
desaparecidos (disappeared persons), Malvinas/Falklands War veterans, protestors and unemployed workers. In
its near two centuries of life as a Republic, the Plaza de Mayo has been the epicenter of porteños, Buenos Aires or
Argentina related passions.
The Pirámide de Mayo is the first monument dedicated to the Republic to be erected by a former European
colony of the Southern Hemisphere. It was built of brick and marrar in 1811 to commemorate Year One of Liberty.
A bronze plaque recalls the first two to fall in a skirmish with royalist troops on the other side of the Río
de la Plata River. The Pirámide was modernized in 1853 and moved to the center of the Plaza de Mayo 30 years later when
the Recova (market), which briged the square from side to side and divided it into Plaza del Fuerte and Plaza
de la Victoria, was demolished. For 25 years, every Thursday at five o'dock in the afternoon, the Mothers and
Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have stood in silence in remembrance of their family members disappeared
during the military dictatorship.
In front of the Casa Rosada, there is a bronze equestrian statue of Manuel Belgrano, an original statue that
it is the work of two artists: Frenchman Albert Carriere-Belleuse, who forged the figure of the illustrious
Belgrano, creator of the flag, and Argentine Manuel de Santa Coloma, responsible for the horse.
| Tourism |
Starting at the Cathedral and Archbishop's Palace and the 17th. century Church of San Francisco with its 19th. century tower, forming a group of outstanding beauty, from there the range of tourist sights spreads out in all directions of Salta - Argentina.
Iguazu Falls - Cataratas del Iguazu - consists of some 275 separate waterfalls - in the rainy season there are as many as 350 - that send their white cascades plunging more than 200 feet onto the rocks below.
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Vacation Apartments in Buenos Aires - Argentina
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