[ Mar.2018 ] Towards the end of our city tour in Buenos Aires in Argentina, we drove through Puerto Madero, the new redevelopment area, after lunch.
The high-rise buildings in this area are all built within the last 28 years.
The offices of Mercedes Benz were there and there was a statue of the car racer, Juan Manuel Fangio Deramo, out the front of the building.
I did not know him at all, but my husband knew his name well, so we got out of the car to take a photo with the statue.
Apparently, Fangio was born in 1911 and died in 1995.
During his life, he won the Formula 1 World Champion title as many as 5 times and he is respected as an Argentinian hero.
After that, we went on to Retiro and visited a building called Edificio Kavanagh.
This building, facing Plaza San Martin, has an anecdote:
A very wealthy family had a palace on the opposite side 
of the square and one of their three sons fell in love with a nouveau riche woman.
However, the mother of the son tore the loving couple apart because she thought the woman was not good enough for her son.
The angry woman built this ugly Edificio Kavanagh just in front of the beautiful church, Basilica de Santisimo Sacramento, where the rich family attended.
This church used to be visible from the family’s palace before, but because of the Kavanagh building, they could no longer see it.
Edificio Kavanagh is 120 metres tall and it was the tallest building in the whole of Latin America when it was completed in 1936.
This anecdote seems to have a few versions and I seem to remember that we heard a similar story last time we visited Buenos Aires, but I did not know that it was a dispute between two women.
A
ccording to our guidebook, this nouveau riche woman was Irish.
The last place we visited was the rose garden, El Rosedal, in the huge park called Parque 3 de Febrero.
In the park, there is a pond where you can row boats, a Japanese garden, a planetarium and other attractions.
Originally, the park was the personal garden of Juan Manuel de Rosas, who was the governor of the Buenos Aires province and a dictator in the 19th century.
The name of the park, 3rd of February, was the date that he lost the battle against his rebellious right hand in 1852.
It appears that he is hated by the citizens of Buenos Aires, so I looked him up on the internet and found that, nowadays, he has a mixed reputation.
One thing is that the reason there are no indigenous people in Buenos Aires is because, in the 1830s, he started an operation to drive them out of the province.
During this operation, thousands of indigenous people were killed.
Anyway, in the peaceful rose garden, we saw an Ombu tree again, which we saw in the Gauchos ranch the day before.
