Heading inland to the Argentine Oktoberfest, in a small German enclave in the province of Cordoba, my friends and I had a daylong stopover in the capital of the province, which has the same name. Named after one of the great Moorish cities of Andalusia, the Argentine Cordoba is a city of about 1 million inhabitants and it was once the largest city in the country.
Though it is now fairly dwarfed by Buenos Aires in terms of size, Cordoba has a rich cultural heritage and fine university, thanks to the Jesuits who founded the centre of the city. The tourism office runs fine free tours of some of these institutions as we found out (after badgering them a bit when we turned up our nose at another 8 peso tour they offered). The free tours have different themes on different days of the week, and we happend to arrive on a patio day. So we spent a nice two hours hoofing it around all the nice old colonial Spanish-style patios of the various and sundry religious establishments downtown, in and around the central plaza with its lovely Cathedral and modern street tiles.
Lots of beautiful old Andalusian style grove patios with oranges, jazmine and other plants, and lush greenery. One of the larger patios in an old homestead included the typical criollo kitchen, with the typical foods...aji (chilies), corn, etc., which were served with the heaping portions of grilled meat common to all of Argentina. It also included the quarters of the black slaves, who were, along with indigenous slaves, commonly kept by the Jesuits and are the true creators of all the beautiful architecture, since it was their toil that went into constructing it.
After the tour ended, we ducked out of the heat in a shaded tent in the main plaza that housed a craft market, then had lunch in a nice Galician restaurant. Pretty good fish for being so far inland...and so far from Galicia. But it is with good reason that Spaniards in Argentina are called Gallegos, as the large majority of Spanish immigrants either come from Galicia or the Basque regions of northern Spain. After walking around a bit more and sitting in the shade of some trees to have mate, we caught an evening bus on to Villa General Belgrano and the Oktberfest, where we began the festivities by having a fine German meal -- knackwurst, chucrut and gulash, as well as pumpernickel bread and generous steins of home-brewed ale. Then we bedded down for the night in our beautiful dutch-owned hostel, which sat in the midst of an organic produce farm where cows, horses, chickens, several dogs and more than a few backpackers roamed freely.
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