Saturday 16 March 2013

The Botanical Gardens and Evita Peron

Having visited the Casa Rosada and seeing the omnipresent Evita, we decided to visit the Evita Museum in Palermo.  This involved a lengthy ride on the subway followed by a walk through the upscale neighbourhood in BA.  We took a small diversion through the botanical gardens and this allowed for a pleasant time in a very green area in this huge city.


A path in the botanical gardens

Many statues are sprinkled throughout the gardens 
As it is the equivalent of the end of August...there were few flowers in the gardens


After our walk through the gardens, we made our way to the Evita Museum.  This is a devoted to Eva Peron and includes footage of her famous speeches and highlights some of her notable accomplishments.

One of Evita's official portraits

At the museum we learned about Evita's tomb, and so on the following day we made our way to the Recoleta Cemetery.  This was remarkable as it is a huge cemetery filled with more than 4,500 individual tombs.  These are arranged in rows like streets and avenues and date back to the 1800's.  There are many spectacular tombs with beautiful statuary and marble decorations.  There are others which have fallen into ruins, albeit that they still contain coffins.  We were astonished by this experience.  The tombs continue deep into the ground.  We could see the steps leading into the depths when we looked through the doors and windows of the tombs.  We found Evita's tomb and stole a small second to take a bad picture before the throngs blocked our view.


The Recoleta cemetery

The cemetery is full of "streets" of tombs 

The statuary and decorations are incredible

There are more than 4800 tombs

Some of the tombs are mausoleums all on their own

Evita's tomb
Our next stop was at the Art museum which was close by.  No pictures were allowed, but we saw beautiful works by some of the masters...the following photos are taken from the brochure and show some of the works we saw.  I was particularly thrilled to see not one, but two pieces done by Monet.




On the way back to our apartment, we were reminded once again about Evita as we drove past a high-rise with her image captured on its side in wrought iron.



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