Sarmiento Park and Iglesia del Sagrado Corazon (Maybe)

This afternoon in Córdoba, Argentina, I visited Sarmiento Park and Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón. At least, that’s one of the two names I found for the church. At the park, I also visited what I think is a significant subset of the park, Parque de la Biodiversidad. Although I’d be willing to believe that it’s a separate park unto itself, which just happens to be immediately beside Sarmiento Park.

Confused yet? I know I am. This should be fun. Let’s continue.

Sarmiento Park

If you haven’t read my post about the Córdoba Tour I took this morning, you should probably pause here, click on the link, read it, and then come back because I’m going to reference material in it.

In that post, I told you that I had been considering coming to Sarmiento Park this afternoon even before going on the tour. Neither my guidebook nor my walking tour map mentioned Sarmiento Park, per se, but the app did mention Cordoba’s zoo, which the app’s map placed in Sarmiento Park.

The tour went through Sarmiento Park. I didn’t see anything that looked like the zoo, but there was a section of the park, or, as I said, maybe a separate park, called Parque de la Biodiversidad. When the tour went by that, the guide talked about the plants in there and, said, at least a couple of times, “But no animals!” She also said that going into Parque de la Biodiversidad is free, but I’d have to reserve a spot online first.

After the tour, I found a shaded bench and did some hunting to find the website to book the reservation. The Parque de la Biodiversidad’s website is mostly in Spanish, but there’s a link to a page in English to book a timeslot.

I hate booking timeslots because I don’t carefully plan my time, but I chose 3:00 in the afternoon. I should have made it later.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself. While I was hunting for the site, I think I solved the mystery of the zoo. It’s gone. With the help of the translate function in my browser, I was able to piece together from a few sites that they shipped the animals off to places closer to their natural habitat.

In its place, they are building a park (they’re still not finished) that will protect and present the native biodiversity of Argentina without any animals in cages. (Aha! That’s why she kept saying, “But no animals!”) That replacement park is Parque de la Biodiversidad, which may or may not be part of Sarmiento Park.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get back to the previous timeline.

The reason I later regretted booking a 3:00 timeslot is that the Cordoba Tour ended a little after noon, and I spent a while doing my web research. Then I had to walk to the park, where I wanted to have some lunch at one of the restaurants in the park with outdoor tables that I’d seen on the tour bus.

By the time I finished lunch, it was a few minutes after 2:00, which didn’t leave much time to explore the other parts of the large park before I had to head to the entrance to Parque de la Biodiversidad. I know I missed a lot of the park. For example, the guide on the tour mentioned a lot of Parisian influences in the park, including a rose garden. I didn’t get a chance to see them.

But, what did I see in the park? Let me tell you.

In addition to the small restaurants in the park, including the one I had lunch at, there’s lots of grass and trees, a playground, and a lovely, irregularly shaped artificial lake with some aquatic flora growing in it. It was very peaceful.

There were a lot of trees —it’s a big park—but, for the most part, they had a fair bit of space between them or they were in a tight row along one of the internal roads through the park. There weren’t any areas that I saw that had a forest feel, which would have been nice on this hot, sunny day.

Then again, as I said, I missed a lot of the park because of my too-early choice of an entry time for Parque de la Biodiversidad. So I might have missed a small forest or two, not to mention a rose garden. Oh, wait. I already mentioned it. Never mind.

From what little I saw of Sarmiento Park, it’s a great asset for Córdoba and a pleasure to spend time in.

Parque de la Biodiversidad

As I said above, I think Parque de la Biodiversidad is a sunset of Sarmiento Park, but I’m not sure. If not, they’re immediately adjacent.

There is one entrance to Parque de la Biodiversidad and one exit. You are required to walk on a one-way route from one to the other. Although, there are some small diversions along the route that you’re allowed to make.

The exit is at a far end of the combined park. That’s why I didn’t double back to see some of Sarmiento Park that I missed. I’m not getting any younger and my legs aren’t getting any stronger

When I got to the entrance, I showed the QR code from my reservation. The person at the entrance scanned the code and then started talking to me. In Spanish.

I stopped her and asked her if she spoke English.

No.

I held up a perfectly polite finger indicating, please wait. I pulled out my phone, opened Google Translate, set it to conversation mode, and asked her to proceed.

I think Google Translate did a good job of hearing her and translating her words, but how would I know?

Here’s what it told me she said:

“Well, you are going to enter through here, the exit is only through Rondosi Street, along the way you will find guides, there are some who speak English, others who do not, and you cannot smoke inside the park. If you see animals you can’t bother feeding them and the photos have to be without flash.”

Not bad, eh?

Babel fish are real, people. Babel fish are real.

I walked along the designated path and didn’t see any animals. Lush vegetation, yes. But no animals. However, I did see indications confirming that this was where the zoo used to be. At a few spots, there was construction hoarding painted with animals not native to Argentina. I assume that there were still some zoo animal compounds waiting to be demolished and converted into more of the local biodiversity park. Plus, there are still some directional signs up pointing to where the animals from various geographic areas of the world used to be. As the final proof, I pulled out my walking tour, looked at the map in the app for the zoo, and it said I was standing where the zoo was.

Earlier, I should have said that I didn’t see any animals until I got to a small pond.

Small flocks of two different types of waterfowl were resident in the pond. One flock looked like they were white geese. The other looked like pink flamingoes.

Do pink flamingoes range into Argentina, or is it another species that looks like pink flamingoes? Enquiring minds want to know. If you come across any enquiring minds and you have the answer, the polite thing to do would be to tell them. Don’t look to me for that.

There was a fence around the pond, but it was only a very low, insubstantial fence. If the birds can fly they’d have no problem clearing it.

Maybe they’ve had their wings clipped. Or maybe they’re on a full meal plan there and don’t want to leave. I hate leaving a table with food on it too.

I followed the path to the exit. At the exit desk, the person there asked me if I had a number. I asked her, “What?” That was the extent of her English. She called over another person there who spoke more English.

He asked me if they gave me a number at the entrance. Then he added, “Like a passport number.”

Oh. They didn’t want to know if the front gate gave me a number, but rather if I gave them a passport number. I hadn’t, but when I booked the reservation, it required that I enter an ID number, it didn’t specify what type. When I made the reservation, my passport was in the safe in my hotel room so I used my driver’s licence number.

I told the people at the exit, “No, I just showed them this.” And I showed them the QR code I had from the reservation. They scanned it, and thanked me. And with that, I started walking back to my hotel, but first stopping to take a look at a church that was along the way.

Iglesia del Sagrado Corazon

I’m not sure this church is called Iglesia del Sagrado Corazon. I saw it when I was walking to dinner, last night, my first night here. I thought it looked interesting and wanted to come back. Then the Córdoba Tour this morning passed by it and the guide said a bit about it.

My guidebook doesn’t mention it at all*. My walking tour app does mention it and calls it “Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón (Church of the Sacred Heart)”. But Apple Maps calls it “Iglesia de los Capuchinos.” I didn’t catch all of the name the tour guide gave for it, but I know she said “Capuchin” when she was talking about it. But then Google Maps hedges its bets by calling it “Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús (Iglesia de los Capuchinos).”

*UPDATE: I subsequently did see it in my guidebook. It is a small listing and the last one for Córdoba. My guidebook calls it “Parroquia Sagrado Corazon de Jesús de los Capuchinos.” It claims the reason for the missing steeple on one of the towers is to symbolize human imperfection. You decide.

I know they are all the same church because the online sources all provide pictures of it, and they were all of the same church. And the tour guide pointed to a church that looked like the pictures.

I give up. I’m going with Iglesia del Sagrado Corazon and may God strike down me and everyone else who uses that name if we are getting it wrong.

(*Joel waits. And waits. And waits.* *He isn’t struck down and, so, assumes he got the name right.*)

One of the reasons I wanted to get a closer look at it than I got on my walk-by and the tour drive-by is that it looks like a really old, interesting church. The first time I saw it, I thought it must have been one of the oldest churches in Córdoba. Unlike a regular reader, I’m hopeless at estimating churches’ ages. And, in my defence, that first time was after dark.

It’s not the oldest. Not even close. According to my walking tour app, construction of it began in 1926 and was completed in 1934. The app tells me that the architect, Augusto Ferrari designed it in the neo-Gothic style he learned in Europe.

The church has two towers on top of the two front corners of the roof. One has a spire, but the other is lopped off. There is a reason for that.

The guide on the Córdoba tour I took this morning said that the difference between the two towers was intended to reflect the difference between the spiritual and the material. My walking tour app says something close to that, but in a different way. It says, “The right side has a truncated tower representing the dying matter, while the 70-meter tower on the other side symbolizes the soul’s ascent.”

The church has several sculptures, including ones standing on either side of the main entrance.

The ceiling is a twilight-sky blue, with small grey stars painted on it. I know they’re stars and not blotches because they had very distinct grey lines radiating out of them. There are also some irregularly shaped. larger white blotches on the ceiling and one of the walls. I don’t think they’re part of the design. I think they are either plaster patches to fix some damage or paint that’s peeled off, revealing the white plaster below.

It’s a somewhat austere (is that part of the definition of Gothic, whether neo or original?) church, but handsome nonetheless.