CHAPTER VI

CÓRDOBA

Córdoba is the third province of Argentina in population, it having had in 1914, 732,727 inhabitants. In area it contains 62,160 square miles. It is the heart of Argentina, being situated in the center of the republic. The eastern part is pampa while the western part is a high, dry plateau, traversed from north to south by mountain ranges notably among which are chains of Pocho and Ischilin. These mountain ranges which are two hundred miles in length are isolated from the Andean system; their southernmost extremities are named the Sierra de Córdoba and are a veritable karst like the Kuestenlande of Austria, gray granite boulders being everywhere. The eastern slopes of this karst are covered with a thick vegetation of mesquite and other shrubs due to the moist Atlantic winds, while their western slopes are destitute of vegetation. The air here is dry and refreshing and the Sierra de Córdoba enjoys the same rôle in Argentina that Colorado does in the United States, being the haunt of consumptives. Likewise the Sierra is the playground of many wealthy Buenos Aires families, for it is a treat to them to get away from the level monotonous plain upon which their city is built. West and northwest of the isolated mountain chain is a vast barren desert, part of it being called the Salinas Grandes on account of the white surface of the soil due to saline deposits. Córdoba is watered by five rivers named the Primero, Segundo, Tercero, Quarto, and Quinto (which means First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth). These rivers are used for irrigating purposes, for water power, and for electricity. The whole province is noted for the pureness of its well water, artesian wells abounding. Every few years the locust or grasshopper plague hits Argentina, and when it comes it strikes Córdoba unusually hard. One of the frontispiece photographs shows a locust trap on a Córdoba farm. This is the catch of two days, the corrugated iron plates having been spread with honey mixed with poison. I consider this one of the most remarkable photographs ever published.

The trip from Tucumán to Córdoba is an 11 hours' trip of 340 miles by the Central of Córdoba Railroad. The track is narrow gauge, but the sleepers, dining car, and service are the best that I have ever chanced on in Argentina. All trains between the two cities make the trip by night, for in the daytime the heat and glare of the sun on the Salinas Grandes, a great salt desert midway between the two cities, is unbearable. This desert abounds with rattlesnakes, called "cascabel." I met a tramp who walked from Tucumán to Córdoba; he was afraid to lie down by the wayside to rest on account of these reptiles. In one day he killed over fifty of them.

The first eighty miles of the journey crosses about as pleasant a country as can be found anywhere, passing through the cities of Bella Vista, La Madrid, and San Pedro. At the latter place, the first town in the Province of Catamarca, desolation begins and continues until daylight the next morning when the traveler awakes at the large town of Dean Funes, the junction for San Juan, capital of the province of the same name. Low rocky hills now rise in every direction; the soil, dry, parched, and somewhat stony is overrun with pampa grass. It is cool and a wind is invariably blowing. The nature of the country continues this way almost to Córdoba, although before reaching that city, the hills to the southwest take the form and acquire the height of mountains.

Córdoba, the third city of Argentina, has a population, exclusive of its suburbs, of one hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants. It was founded in 1573 by Luis Geronimo de Cabrera, and has always been noted as a seat of learning and of religion. Its university, which vies with that of San Marcos in Lima in being the oldest in the Western Hemisphere, was founded June 19, 1613, by a Jesuit father, Fernando de Trejo y Sanabria. The first printing press in Argentina was brought to this university from Lima in 1765. Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, Paraguay's able dictator, was a graduate of Córdoba's university. The churches, cloisters, convents, and religious institutions of the city are innumerable, and it is estimated that over six thousand of its inhabitants are connected with the religious orders and organizations. Córdoba is one of the cleanest cities in America, and it is difficult to find a place where civic pride, park system, cleanliness of house exteriors, public buildings, pavement, hotels, cafés, department stores, banks, residences, religious edifices, and water supply taken as a whole can equal that of it. Many cities may excel it in one or two of the above mentioned institutions but not in the majority. Personally I would not care to live there unless engaged in some business, as there are too many "lungers," and the surrounding country is but a dry and rocky karst; the diversion of street life would soon become irksome, for with the exception of cafés, moving picture shows, theaters, and an occasional horse race, no Argentine city possesses any real live amusement places, excepting those that are synonymous with lights seen through carmine transoms, and they happily are not in my line.

I can see no reason for Córdoba's existence and growth. The soil of the country is poor and rocky, while the rainfall is slight. In the year 1915, seven months elapsed without a drop falling. The city is situated to the west of the productive part of the province, and from it westward to San Juan at the foot of the Andes, the country is the poorest in the republic. Yet Córdoba has had a rapid growth recently. In the manufacturing line, it has three breweries, that of Pollak and Brueck, generally called the Córdoba Brewery; that of the Ahrens, and the main brewery of the Rio Segundo Company. There is a large flour mill owned by Minetti, an Italian, and several brickyards. Here are also located the shops of the Central of Córdoba Railroad.

The chief industry of Córdoba is brewing, this being largely due to the remarkable pureness of its well water which is artesian. Señor Nicolas J. Oderigo, manager of the bank of the Argentine nation, wrote me a letter of introduction to Mr. C. Davis, president of the Rio Segundo Brewing Company, which I visited in the company of Señor Stange, an employee of Oderigo's bank, and whom he had the kindness to send with me to accompany me. This large brewery has a branch at the town of Rio Segundo, which was the original brewery. The Rio II. Brewery is an independent brewery, not being allied to the Quilmes outfit as is generally supposed. Mr. Davis received me courteously and after having shown me the establishment invited Stange and myself to his house where he entertained us at dinner. Señor Stange is either a German or of German descent, but when I asked him about it he denied it, and also told me he could not speak a word of that language. A day or two later I passed by him while he was seated in animated conversation in a café with two other men, and the language he was conversing in was German. As Mr. Davis is an Englishman, Stange evidently had private reasons to cover his nationality. The brewmaster of the Rio II. Brewery told me that brewing was not a profitable industry in Argentina, because the Quilmes company was a trust and its members being affiliated with the political party that is in power, it has the capital and the means to drive the smaller breweries to the wall, by stringent legislation and usurious taxation. This Rio II. Brewery is smaller than the large breweries of Detroit, yet it pays more taxes than does the Anheuser-Busch Brewery or the Pabst or Schlitz breweries.

The Córdoba Brewery as I have mentioned is owned by Pollak and Brueck. Pollak is an Austrian Jew who married a Córdoba woman, and who turned Roman Catholic to get prestige, but like most people who are members of the race he abjured, his business methods are not considered synonymous with good faith.

His beer, to my idea, is the most palatable of any of the Córdobese beers. Amber is the name of his light product, while Muenchen is that of his dark. With the townspeople his product is the most popular, notwithstanding his personal unpopularity.

The approach to Córdoba by rail is similar on a small scale to that of La Paz, Bolivia, for both cities lie in a pocket in the hills and their presence is not visible until the ground of the plain above them drops away, and they are seen below you. The pocket which contains La Paz is ten times deeper, the surprise of the traveler on first viewing the city being that of astonishment; but here in Córdoba, although the scale is exceedingly miniature, the conditions are analogous. The growth of Córdoba has been such that there is no more room left for building in the pocket, so now the new resident who wishes to build a home of his own is obliged to do so on the plain above the city. Several suburbs have sprung up and go by the names of Alta Córdoba, Alberdi, and Nueva Córdoba.

Alta Córdoba can be likened to the station Alto de La Paz, although here there is quite a large town. Here is situated the Central of Córdoba railroad station with the railroad workshops, and a market named Mercado del Norte. A fine, broad avenue winds from Alta Córdoba in big curves, down a cleft in the hillside, passes under a stone railroad bridge, and reaches the river bottom at the beautiful shady park of Las Heras. It now crosses the Rio Primero over a new stone bridge, named the Centenario, at whose end is the Avenue General Paz. This is where begins the city proper, which on the floor of the valley is twenty-one blocks wide by thirty-one blocks long, and which does not include the other suburbs in the pocket which are named San Vicente at the eastern and Villa Paez at the western ends of the original town.

The Plaza San Martin is in the center of Córdoba and is the nucleus of the city life. From here run straight streets east and west, and north and south which are the busy ones of the capital. On the plaza is the cathedral, two of the leading banks, and the best hotels. The business arrangement of this particular section is like that of Tucumán. The great show street is the aristocratic and superbly beautiful Avenida General Paz, beginning at the plaza of the same name at the Centenario Bridge and continuing ten blocks southward to the Plaza Velez Sarsfield. This street is the handsomest in Argentina. From the Plaza Velez Sarsfield there is a continuation of it to the heights beyond the city proper, and which is here named the Avenida Velez Sarsfield.

From the Plaza Velez Sarsfield the new Avenida Argentina, destined to become the most exclusive residential street of the city on account of the high price of the terrain, ascends to the plazas Centenario and Dean Funes at the entrance of Sormiento Park, Córdoba's playground. Halfway up the Avenida Argentina on the left-hand side stands a magnificent and imposing mansion, that of Señor Martin Ferreyra. It is a landmark, and seen from the plain at the opposite end of the city, it looms up as if it dominates over the city and no other building seems as large. It has already cost its owner over three million pesos ($1,281,000) and is not yet completed.

"How did Señor Ferreyra make his money?" I asked the chauffeur.

"His father left a large sum of money which had been handed down from several generations. Martin Ferreyra was made administrator of his father's estate and cheated the other heirs out of their share," was his answer.

The zoölogical garden at the Parque Sarmiento lies in a cleft of the ridge and was laid out in 1914 by a German engineer. It is open to the public Thursdays and Sundays and is entered by descending in a funicular or by a circuitous way on foot. Although it is planned to house many animals, the only large mammals there at present are some seals which sport beneath the spray of an artificial cascade, and a pair of lions which a Montevideo gentleman presented to an ex-governor of Córdoba, who has loaned them to the city, probably at the expense of the latter.

Debreczen, Hungary, is nicknamed locally, "Rome of the Protestants"; Córdoba is nicknamed "Rome of Argentina" on account of its numerous churches, convents, monasteries, other religious institutions, and multitude of priests. There are several thousand of the latter body of men; they and the soldiers are not reckoned in the national census of urban population for they are constantly moving from place to place. There are fourteen large churches including the cathedral, and sixteen other Catholic Houses of God which would be considered large in the United States, but which are here classed as mediocre. In contrast with the churches of all the rest of South America, excepting those of Brazil, those of Northern Argentina are much more beautiful with their splendid façades, domes, and towers, the latter being roofed with variegated porcelain tiles; blues predominating. Córdoba, Tucumán, and Salta are especially rich in the appearance of their churches, Tucumán taking the lead in the ornateness of the tiles. In Córdoba are the large churches of Merced, Jesuit Fathers, and Santo Domingo, but by far the largest and finest church in all Argentina is the cathedral, three centuries old, its architecture being that of the current Spanish style that was in vogue at the time it was built. There are a few cathedrals in America larger, those of Montreal, Mexico City, Lima, New York, Santiago, Bahia, Montevideo, and Rio de Janeiro in order of their size, but none excel that of Córdoba in proud richness.

It is one of the finest churches in America with the best mural paintings of any. In this latter respect it is only exceeded by those of Italy. Its towers and dome are not tiled, as that art was copied from the Portuguese and Brazilians only during the last century. Decadent Romanesque, it has a solemn dignity of its own.

Of the hotels, the Plaza is the best. It is on the northeast corner of the Plaza San Martin, and is new. It is a solid four-story structure, with good rooms, and is well furnished but poorly managed. There is a sunparlor on the second floor. The manager told me that most of the rooms have baths in connection, but in this he lied. I do not believe that any of the rooms have a private bath. This same manager, an Engadine Swiss, was formerly the head portier of the Hotel Savoy in Rosario. I knew him of old, and crookedness is, with him, second nature. The restaurant of the Plaza Hotel is the best in the city. It is on the ground floor and has a street entrance; in connection with it is a café and a confectionery store. The meals are _à la carte_, but I understand that people staying at the Plaza for any length of time may get _pension_. The café is a large one, on the Viennese style, and connects with the restaurant by a passageway under a platform on top of which are stationed the orchestra, so that the musical wants of both the eaters and drinkers can be satisfied at the same time. The bar is on the United States style, and as is seldom the case in South America and not frequent enough in North America, the back bar is deep enough to give the bartenders working space, and allows them enough room to reach for a bottle without getting into each other's way.

Across Calle San Geronimo from the Hotel Plaza is the Hotel San Martin, a good house, and managed by the former manager of the Plaza. This manager holds the unenviable reputation of cheating his foreign help. In Argentina, a native or a naturalized citizen always wins out in a lawsuit. When I asked some of the ex-employees of the San Martin why they did not sue the manager for their back wages which they claimed were deliberately withheld, they said:

"We would look fine as Spaniards and Austrians going up against an Argentino in court here. The manager would trump up some lie, and have us arrested on some false charge and it would work."

Another good hotel is the Roma, two stories high and built on the patio system.

The Central Argentina Railroad and the Central of Córdoba both print luxurious illustrated folders and do much advertising relative to the beauties and charming mountain scenery of the Sierra de Córdoba, an uninteresting range of quasi barren hills in the neighborhood of the city. My advice to strangers is to pay no attention to these deceptive advertisements and not to go there, for the person that "bites" feels afterwards like "the fool with his money parted." This last might apply to pecuniary losses that are apt to befall him at the green cloth tables in Alta Gracia. This Sierra de Córdoba is an irregular mass of rocky hills, which in some places attains the form of mountains. The summits are over four thousand feet high and where this altitude is reached in the mountains to the west, the Córdobese call them Los Gigantes (The Giants) for they have never seen any mountains that are greater. They are covered with brush, while here and there is a small tree. As for scenic beauty they are not worth three cents.

Alta Gracia is a great gambling establishment licensed by the provincial authorities, and as these railroad companies know the bend of the native mind, advertise this place which besides the gambling house is nothing but a large hotel, a hamlet, and an old mission church. I visited all the advertised places which include Dique San Roque, Cosquin, La Falda, Tanti, and Capilla de Monte and found none worth the while. Dique San Roque is a dam somewhat similar to the Sweetwater Dam near San Diego, California, where a greenish lake empties its waters into the Calera River to supply electrical power. It is twenty miles from Córdoba, the last five being the only part of the trip that can come anywhere near to being classified under the title scenery. The hills here are wooded with small trees, and the dangerous automobile road runs around promontories on ledges where the slightest mishap with the steering would shoot both passenger and chauffeur into eternity.

To go to Cosquin, thirty-seven miles from Córdoba, keep straight ahead until you reach the stone marked kilometro 28, which is the turning-off place for Dique San Roque. Keep straight ahead and you will come to the hamlet of San Roque where is a church and the residence of the jefe politico. A road to the left leads to Alta Gracia, but that to the right goes to Cosquin. After a long drive over the rocky karst, the village of Villa Bialet Masset is reached. It consists of a long dusty street flanked by sordid one-story houses. A National Consumptives Home on a grandiose scale is here. The scenery has become better as there is a green, although dusty valley watered by the Cosquin River. Cosquin is an unattractive town of three thousand inhabitants. The Hotel Mundial serves good meals but there is no diversion for its guests, who pass the time of day reading novels on the veranda or slumber in the garden.

The inhabitants of the Province of Córdoba talk in a sing song manner and are known by their fashion of articulation in any part of the republic they may chance to find themselves in.

It is a ten hours' ride on the accommodation train from Córdoba to Rosario, although the express trains which run by night only shorten the time by a couple of hours. The country is a dry but productive plain, and is fairly thickly settled; every few miles there is a town. These range from a few hundred to a few thousand inhabitants. In the summer of 1916 the whole region had been planted to corn, but the locust pest had been so busy that there was nothing left but the bare stalks. This disaster reached to the outskirts of Rosario. The locusts had even eaten all the leaves off the trees, their naked branches having the appearance of their winter garb. Millions of dollars had gone to waste on account of them, and I know an _estanciero_ in the Province of Buenos Aires who in a single year had destroyed by them sixty-five thousand dollars' worth of crops. They attack everything but the garden truck, and by their sputum poison the streams. A man should never buy land for crops in Argentina without reckoning on this plague.

The Province of Santa Fé had, according to the last census, a population of 1,111,426, ranking in this line the second of the Argentine provinces. Its area is 50,916 square miles and has as its capital city, Santa Fé, which has a population of 91,636. Rosario, frequently called Rosario de Santa Fé to distinguish it from Rosario de La Frontera in the Province of Salta, is the largest city. Its population is 316,914, it being the second city of Argentina, and the sixth in South America, those larger in order being Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Santiago, and Montevideo.

Rosario was founded by Francisco Godoy in 1725, but its growth dates from recent years. Although its aspect was practically the same as when I saw it three years previously, I could not help noticing that now there were much greater crowds on the streets than formerly, and that the principal business street had changed from the Calle General San Martin to its intersector, Calle Córdoba. It is the outlet to a grain country superior to that behind Buenos Aires, and is the livest commercial city in Argentina. There are quite a few local industries such as car shops, a sugar refinery, grain elevators, flour mills, and breweries. The largest importing house in Argentina, that of Chiesa Brothers, is located here as well as the largest drug firm. The city is essentially Italian, its influence predominating, although numerically the other foreigners and natives together have a larger population than the immigrants from the Lavinian shores. Rosario is also a center for artisans, their sculptors vying with those of Genoa in the chiseling of marble for tombs and statuary in Buenos Aires and in different parts of South America. The city is by no means beautiful nor can it ever be on account of the flatness of its location. There are eight small plazas but none of them are near the center of business. The streets are narrow, and are solidly lined with buildings many of which are imposing. This with the absence of plazas as breathing spaces, together with the street crowds give to Rosario an entirely commercial atmosphere. The courthouse is a large, long pile with a high domed tower surmounting the center, and is one of the most imposing buildings in Argentina. It is on the north side of the Plaza San Martin about a mile from the hub of activity of the city. On the east side of the same plaza, and just completed, is the Police Headquarters covering an entire block and undoubtedly the most modern and largest of its kind in the world. Two other fine buildings are the Jockey Club and the Centro Español, both also recently completed.

The Hotel Italia is the best, although its situation on a side street, the Calle Maipu, between Calles Rioja and San Luis is poor. The Savoy where I stopped, was formerly Rosario's Blackstone, but it has greatly deteriorated in all respects. The only thing attractive about it is the chambermaid on the second floor, a pretty giggling Spanish damsel. The Hotel de Mayo is a good second-class house and serves the best meals of any of the hotels, its restaurant rivaling that of the Rôtisserie Sportsman which is above the Bar Victoria. This Bar Victoria is the finest refreshment parlor in South America. Its walls are decorated with tapestry, its furniture is of mahogany, and its fixtures are of brass, kept well-polished. It gave one of the Catalan waiters great pleasure to see me cross its threshold after an absence of three years and enjoy a glass of foaming Germania in the dull cathedral light of a waning day.

Tributary to Rosario, which is their shopping center, and inland some distance in the heart of good farming lands, are three towns: Pergamino, seventy miles to the south, Casilda, thirty-three miles to the southwest, and Cañada de Gomez, forty-one miles to the west. Pergamino, the largest of all, is in the Province of Buenos Aires, being directly across the provincial line and is a railroad town. It is the junction of several branch lines of the Central of Argentina Railroad and is on the main line of the narrow gauge General Railroads of the Province of Buenos Aires. It has a population of twenty-eight thousand inhabitants and owes its prosperity to stock raising and corn growing.

This city I visited, choosing it as a good example of _campo_ town for such is styled the Argentine prairie, and stopped over night at the excellent Hotel Roma, which is not only remarkable as being one of the finest buildings in the city, but strange to say is one of the few hotels in Argentina, excluding Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Tucumán, which has private baths in connection with the sleeping-rooms.

Viewed from the housetops, Pergamino appears a city of windmills; they rise everywhere. Water being scarce makes them a necessity. The city which is compactly built is fundamentally Italian. It is compactly built but has only one main street, that named San Nicolás, which is paved with wooden creosote blocks. The buildings are mostly but a single story high, and the nomenclatures over the store entrances savor of the River Po or the Etruscan Hills. With the exception of Calle San Nicolás, the other thoroughfares are unpaved. The edifices that flank them are of reddish brown brick with a minimum of mortar or lime between the cracks. Like the outskirts and side streets of most of the small towns of Argentina, the aspect is hideous and dismal, for the edifices are mere brick hovels bordering dusty lanes, abounding with mongrel curs that munch offal and garbage thrown from the front windows of the morgue-like habitations. There is in Pergamino a plaza, named 25 de Mayo, several blocks from the business section. It is large and poorly kept up, and is bordered on all sides by double rows of pine trees, which have attained a tall but slender growth, large enough however to make saw timber. These trees were planted thirty years ago; at home it would take them one hundred years to have attained the same proportions.

From Pergamino to Buenos Aires, 166 miles by the General Railroad of the Province of Buenos Aires, only two towns are passed that have any pretext for importance. They are Salto, thirty-six miles from Pergamino, and Mercedes, sixty-nine miles from Buenos Aires. Mercedes has a population of more than thirty thousand inhabitants, and strange to say its streets are numbered instead of being named. This system is different from ours for 1st Street crosses 25th Street, and 34th Street crosses 16th Street, and so forth. It is so arranged that the high-numbered streets are in the center of the town while the low-numbered ones are on the outskirts. When the trains make their first stop it is at the 25th Street station. The stranger traveling through is apt to say: "Gee, but this is quite a town," judging by the high numbers of its streets, while in reality 1st Street is way out in the meadows far from the activity of central life. Mercedes was formerly the stamping ground of Irish immigrants. Many of these have become rich and powerful, and to-day retain their Hibernian names without speaking a word of English. I met a girl in Buenos Aires whose patronymic was O'Grady, yet she was conversant in no language but Spanish. Some of the Irish settlers did not prosper as well as the minority of the rich landed proprietors of Mercedes; this is testified by the native born whiskered Irish bums who immigrated from Mercedes to Buenos Aires who are seen wandering about the streets of the Argentine capital, garbed in rags and invariably drunk on ginevra, a low-grade gin.