Córdoba: The Jesuit Block and the Cathedral
Few urban walking circuits in Argentina carry this density of colonial and institutional history into so compact a space. The Manzana Jesuítica — the Jesuit Block — occupies a single city block in the historic centre and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000, recognised alongside five Jesuit estancias scattered across the province. The Jesuits arrived in Córdoba in 1599 and within a generation had built the intellectual infrastructure of an entire region: a novitiate, a college, and what became the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, the oldest university in Argentina and the fourth-oldest in the Americas. The block today comprises the Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús — consecrated in 1671, its wooden barrel vault assembled without nails in the form of an inverted ship's hull — the Capilla Doméstica, the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat, and the university's historical museum. When Carlos III expelled the Jesuits from the Spanish empire in 1767, the order had been at this address for less than 170 years; they left behind buildings that the city has spent the centuries since trying to figure out what to do with.
A short walk away, the Catedral Nuestra Señora de la Asunción closes the afternoon. The site was designated for the city's principal church in 1577 — four years after Córdoba's foundation — and the building that stands today is the result of more than two centuries of construction, collapse, redesign, and gradual embellishment. The first structure was adequate only until 1677, when it fell in on itself, killing the parish priest and several parishioners. What rose in its place was guided by a succession of architects from across the colonial world: José González Merguete from Alto Perú, the Jesuit Andrés Blanqui who completed the facade in 1729, and the Franciscan friar Vicente Muñoz who designed the great dome in the 1750s. The bell towers, with their carved angels bearing distinctly indigenous faces, were finished in 1770; the cathedral was officially consecrated in 1784. The interior decoration came last of all — early twentieth century, directed by the Catamarca-born painter Emilio Caraffa, whose gilded nave columns and vaulted ceiling give the space its present quality of layered time.