Plaza de Mayo
We started our tour on the Plaza de Mayo – which apparently follows a common and identical design element as virtually every South American city in a country that was colonized by the Spanish. If you think about it, that happened in the US quite a bit, too – especially under Franklin Roosevelt. After all, if you already have a set of plans for something that works, why not use it over and over?
Center squares therefore have a government building on one side (City Hall, in this case), opposite that is a building for the larger government (the Casa Rosada or “Pink House” in this case, the seat of the national authority and where the president works), and a Church along one side – in this case, the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, which happened to be the home of the Bishop of Buenos Aires when he was merely Jorge Bergoglio, before he got upgraded to being Pope Francis.
Historically, Buenos Aires was built in the middle of nowhere. It’s on the east coast of Argentina at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, the river that happens to serve as the border between Argentina and Uruguay, who didn’t always get along.
So going way back, Spain was interested in colonizing lots of places that were minding their own business because they thought there was gold there. In reality, most of the gold in South America was up in Peru. You couldn’t dig it out and then put it on a ship directly back to the home office, though, because it was inconveniently located on the far side of South America from Spain. Therefore, they would ship it up to Panama – that skinny place in the continents between North and South America, and because the Panama Canal had not yet been built it had to be taken off the ship, hauled (probably by donkeys) about 50 miles across the land and then put it on another ship to continue the journey to Spain.
Easy-peasy, right? Except for one little problem – Disney did not just think up the “Pirates of the Caribbean” so they’d have a ride available. Those guys were real and developed a business model that consisted of attacking and removing that gold from the Spanish ships, thereby depriving the invaders of their ill-gotten gains.
It didn’t help out the natives of Peru, but there was some bit of poetic justice in it.
Not to be deterred, the Spanish figured out that they could avoid the Caribbean entirely by simply going south from Peru, around South America (at Cape Horn), rather than going North to Panama. The problem was, they needed a bit of a rest stop after they’d rounded Cape Horn down there at the bottom and been shaken around through “Drake’s Passage” (more about that in a few days).
Center squares therefore have a government building on one side (City Hall, in this case), opposite that is a building for the larger government (the Casa Rosada or “Pink House” in this case, the seat of the national authority and where the president works), and a Church along one side – in this case, the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, which happened to be the home of the Bishop of Buenos Aires when he was merely Jorge Bergoglio, before he got upgraded to being Pope Francis.
Historically, Buenos Aires was built in the middle of nowhere. It’s on the east coast of Argentina at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, the river that happens to serve as the border between Argentina and Uruguay, who didn’t always get along.
So going way back, Spain was interested in colonizing lots of places that were minding their own business because they thought there was gold there. In reality, most of the gold in South America was up in Peru. You couldn’t dig it out and then put it on a ship directly back to the home office, though, because it was inconveniently located on the far side of South America from Spain. Therefore, they would ship it up to Panama – that skinny place in the continents between North and South America, and because the Panama Canal had not yet been built it had to be taken off the ship, hauled (probably by donkeys) about 50 miles across the land and then put it on another ship to continue the journey to Spain.
Easy-peasy, right? Except for one little problem – Disney did not just think up the “Pirates of the Caribbean” so they’d have a ride available. Those guys were real and developed a business model that consisted of attacking and removing that gold from the Spanish ships, thereby depriving the invaders of their ill-gotten gains.
It didn’t help out the natives of Peru, but there was some bit of poetic justice in it.
Not to be deterred, the Spanish figured out that they could avoid the Caribbean entirely by simply going south from Peru, around South America (at Cape Horn), rather than going North to Panama. The problem was, they needed a bit of a rest stop after they’d rounded Cape Horn down there at the bottom and been shaken around through “Drake’s Passage” (more about that in a few days).
Thus, those early realtors sensed a growing market and Buenos Aires was developed as a rest stop and defensive outpost.
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