Morning in San Telmo

I chose to visit the San Telmo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires this morning for a specific reason. There is a recommended tourist sight, an enclosed market, Mercado de San Telmo, that’s open seven days a week. But on Sundays, the city closes a long stretch of an adjacent main street, Defensa, and turns it into an outdoor market. My guidebooks and the guide on the Buenos Aires Food Tour I went on a couple of days ago all recommended both the permanent and the Sunday market.

Today is Sunday, so I visited the permanent and Sunday markets, along with a couple of other sights in San Telmo.

Mercado de San Telmo

Maybe I’ve become jaded from seeing so many old markets in various parts of the world, but despite being highly recommended, I found Mercado de San Telmo only so-so.

The first point that needs to be made is that it’s not a food market. Or, at least, vendors don’t sell distinct fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, or cheeses.

However, it has what I’ll call a “food court” that’s a fair size. I put “food court” in quotes because for me, and I think most people, or maybe just North Americans, it conjures up an image very much apart from what this space is.

For me, “food court” brings to mind a sterile space, usually in an uninspiring shopping mall. Small stalls typically occupied by generic outlets of mediocre fast food chains surround an expanse of purely functional tables.

That’s about as far as you can get from what’s at Mercado de San Telmo. It exudes the charm and rawness of its age. And stalls line both sides of the small grid of narrow aisles.

As best as I could tell, the food stalls were independently owned and operated. Most had counters with stools for eating at the stall. There was also a small area with some wooden picnic tables where families or other groups could eat together with food from different stalls.

The “food court” didn’t take up all of the Mercado de San Telmo. I didn’t commission a survey of the building, but I’m pretty sure it’s less than half.

The stalls in the merchandise section are also laid out in a grid of aisles. The merchandise varied. There were leather goods, jewelry, clothing, kitchenware, and various knick-knacks, including vintage knick-knacks. In addition to the grid of narrow aisles, there was one short, wide section that felt more like a single-aisle mall.

Part of why I felt that it was kind of meh relative to some of the other old markets I’ve been to was that it wasn’t very lively. The fact that maybe a quarter of the stalls were closed today was probably responsible for that. They didn’t appear to be permanently closed, just closed for the day.

Most of the stalls at Mercado de San Telmo are enclosed, so they can be closed up without the vendors having to remove their wares when they’re not working. Many stalls had at least some glass out front so I could see the neatly displayed goods inside. None of them had the appearance of being permanently vacated stalls. I guess some of the vendors take Sundays off.

The Sunday street market may drain some of the business from Mercado de San Telmo, not leaving enough traffic for the vendors there to make it worthwhile to open. I don’t know.

Feria de San Telmo

Speaking of the Sunday street market on Defensa, the market has a name, Feria de San Telmo, which Google Translate tells me translates into San Telmo Fair.

When I read and heard about what I now know is called Feria de San Telmo, I got the impression that it sort of spilled out of the Mercado de San Telmo. I might just have gotten the wrong impression. I walked out of the Defensa side of the market and expected to see the street market there. It wasn’t. The street was empty of vendors and tables.

However, I looked in one direction on Defensa and saw in the distance some white canopies over what I assumed were tables, but my old eyes aren’t good enough to be sure. (By the way, not that anyone but me is interested, however, about a week after I get back home, I have an appointment to get my eyes evaluated to determine if my cataracts are far enough along to warrant cataract surgery. I’m hoping that, if they are, new lenses will make my old eyes young again, and I’ll be able to see such things. I live to dream.)

I walked down to the white-canopied mirage and found that it wasn’t a mirage, but indeed the Feriade de San Telmo.

The stalls were tables set up on the street, with white canvas or plastic canopies on poles to protect the vendors and their goods from the sun and the rain that didn’t happen while I was there. (I experienced a few sprinkles earlier in the morning. More were forecast, but it didn’t happen.)

The market carried on for several blocks along Defensa and onto a block of some of the cross streets. I didn’t see any vintage goods. There were mostly crafts, leather goods, bags, stuffed and other toys, jewelry, candles and scents. Plus, there were more than a few stalls selling maté cups of various styles, materials, and qualities. Before the Buenos Aires Food Tour I took a couple of days ago, I’d never heard of maté. Now it’s everywhere. I could have bought a maté experience as part of my last stop of the morning, but because I’d already done it on the food tour, I didn’t.

The Feria de San Telmo was enjoyable, but, not being a shopping enthusiast—I barely tolerate it—it was time to move on. My guidebooks recommended Plaza Dorrego, which is also in the San Telmo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires.

Plaza Dorrego

Plaza Dorrego is Buenos Aires’s second-oldest public square, dating from the 18th century. The only square that’s older is Plaza de Mayo, which I’ll visit this afternoon.

The plaza is fronted on Defensa, but on the other side of the Mercado de San Telmo from the Feria de San Telmo. Or, at least I thought it was on the other side from the Feria de San Telmo.

I walked along several blocks of a marketless Defensa to Plaza Dorrego. I can’t tell you what the square looks like on most days. When I got there, it was filled with a flea market, selling used stuff, as flea markets tend to do. Here, some of the vendor tables were covered by canopies, and some weren’t.

Many of the vendors’ spots were naturally canopied by trees, so I imagine Plaza Dorrego is a very relaxing place when the market isn’t there.

The blocks immediately around the square were closed to traffic and also taken over by vendors. Some of them sold the same sort of vintage stuff as in the square, but some sold merchandise more like what I saw down the street. One of the vendors on the street sold maté cups. But these weren’t ordinary maté cups. The cup was surrounded by what looked like silver. The vendor was busy with a hammer that he used to whack another instrument that he used to etch designs into the silver, or whatever metal it was. Cool.

Signage in the square and on the street told me that this too was part of Feria de San Telmo. So it wasn’t so much that Plaza Dorrego was on the other side of Mercado de San Telmo from the Feria de San Telmo as Feria de San Telmo simply took a break and then reconstituted itself in Plaza Dorrego.

El Zanjón

El Zanjón was a very pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting much based on what I read about it, but it turned out to be very interesting. It can be visited only on a guided tour, which is available in either English or Spanish.

Most of the information below came from the tour guide on my English tour. Despite him telling the assembled guests and it being on a name tag, I’m not sure I’m remembering his name accurately. I think it was “Julian.” I remember it started with a “J” because I recall telling myself when he said his name to remember that it started with what would be an English “h” sound rather than our “j” sound.

Huh. As I typed those words, it occurred to me that I hope no one here pronounces my name with a starting “h” sound. I very much don’t want to be known as a hole.

Even though I might be misremembering it, I’ll refer to the guide as Julian. My sincerest apologies to him if I’m wrong.

El Zanjón is a private museum in the San Telmo neighbourhood. In 1985, the current owner, Jorge Eckstein, bought the building. At that point, the structure had been condemned for seven years as a collapse hazard. Because it had been boarded up and condemned, Jorge (Julan referred to him as Jorge, not Mr. Eckstein, so I’ll take my cue from him) couldn’t look inside until after he bought it.

Jorge intended to convert the building into a restaurant. A lot of people advised him to rip it down and build from scratch, but he wanted to restore it instead.

To get his first look inside, he got a ladder and climbed onto the second floor. I guess the idea was that if the building was going to collapse, it’d be better to fall into the first floor than to have the second floor fall on him.

What he saw was a lot of rubble and garbage filling the space. On doing some necessary shoring, clearing out the rubbish and getting a closer look, he and the engineers saw a major crack in the back wall. They thought that might indicate that, rather than being built on an unexcavated foundation as they thought, there might be a basement.

One day, when an engineer was in there, the first floor collapsed and offered absolute proof of the existence of a basement. (The engineer was okay despite the fall.)

Jorge then called in archaeologists. In digging, they found a couple of old cisterns, artifacts, and a tunnel. According to Julian, those cisterns collected rainwater and people used to keep turtles in them, thinking that they’d filter the water by eating all of the bugs that fell into the cistern. I was skeptical. Julian said he was too. Like all animals, Turtles have digestive systems that need to evacuate waste. And like all animals, they eventually die, and they stayed in the cisterns until someone saw they were dead and fished them out.

Jorge became very interested in the building and went to the archives to find documents about it, and he sought out oral histories to learn more. He found that it was originally a mansion. It lasted as such for only three or four decades. Diseases related to poor sanitation ravaged Buenos Aires, and the rich people moved out. (I wonder if the turtles in the drinking water had anything to do with the diseases.)

The mansion was turned into a tenement house. The lower level contained retail shops, but the upper level of what had been a single mansion was carved up into rooms that housed 100 people who shared a single kitchen and two bathrooms. It continued as such until it was condemned in 1977.

Jorge spent years lovingly restoring the building into the beautiful structure it is today.

But the tunnel is also a key part of the story. There used to be a creek there. The tunnel carried it under the building. The tunnel was also used for sewage. When the city built a sewage system, the tunnel was filled with rubbish.

When Jorge cleared out the rubbish, he saw that there were walls in the tunnel on the boundaries of his property and the buildings on either side. On one side, a four-storey building had been built, so the tunnel under that property was likely erased by the foundation that had to be dug down for it. But Jorge didn’t know what was on the other side.

When word got out that Jorge had a tunnel under his property, the neighbour told him that he did too. They decided to knock down the wall and join their two tunnels. Then the owner from the next property over said that he, too, had a tunnel. So they did the same and made a longer tunnel.

The next property over was one that Jorge had bought, intending to put a parking lot there for his restaurant. It too had a tunnel, which got joined with the other sections. The intervening property owners still own their sections of the tunnel, but they’ve given Jorge the right to run tours through it as part of his museum. The restaurant never opened.

(Picture-taking is allowed in Jorge’s property but not in the sections of the tunnel owned by other people.)

I forgot to mention that on the main floor of the former mansion, there are three blow-ups of old pictures of people who lived in the building when it was a tenement. The pictures were all brought in by the people in them. One is of a little girl who is now a woman in her nineties.

Another is a picture of a young boy. When he grew up, he got a job at the Buenos Aires Sheraton. When a new museum opened up in town, the hotel sent him over to check it out so they could tell their guests about it. When the boy, then man, got there, he realized it was the house he grew up in.

I don’t remember if Julian told us about the person in the third picture, but he said they now all have lifetime passes to the museum.

In the basement level, there are some old framed paintings and drawings hung on the walls. There are also some artifacts found in the excavation, but I forget if they were displayed in the basement or the tunnel.

While we were in the lower level of the mansion, and after Julian detailed the restorations that were done, someone asked him if he knew how much the restoration cost. He said he didn’t know, but Jorge still works and has an office there. Jorge wasn’t in today because it’s Sunday, but Julian said he sometimes takes over the tours when he is there. Whenever anyone asks him how much it costs, the only response he gives is, 25 years of my life. He never did build his restaurant there, or anywhere else.

What a great experience!