palace of waters

After the cholera and yellow fever epidemics in Buenos Aires, the city officials decided to clean up the water. They built the first water cleaning system in South America, and they decided to house all the tanks and pumps behind the façade of a palace. It is a beautiful Victorian edifice with Royal Dalton ceramics from England adorning the exterior.

Now it houses the Museum of Water and the History of Sanitation, which we found pretty interesting.

We didn’t worry too much about making the daily tour at 11, since it is in Spanish, but when we asked to see the tanks, we were told that they only show them on the tour. Then a few minutes later another gentleman appeared and told me that he would take us on the tour of the tanks if I would translate. (We actually believe that he spoke perfect English because he was approving the translation with head nods and then he himself started throwing in English phrases.) We were really grateful for his effort which made the museum even more interesting for us.

The first floor is a place where local people can go to pay their water bill and the architectural details were really stunning, but the guards didn’t want photos taken there, so I only got the floors.

I mentioned our visit to the museum in my talk on Sunday at district conference. Based on the reaction then, I think this is a little-known museum, but it was a hit with all of us.

Next, we went to the National Museum of Decorative Arts. Originally, it was the custom built house for the Alvear Family. It had something like 44,000 square feet. We saw the first two floors. The lower one had reception rooms and the upper one had their four bedrooms. The top level housed the kitchen and 30 servants quarters, but was unavailable for viewing. Every room was a different style architecture to showcase the owner’s collections in an era appropriate ambiance. The designer was French and never actually came to Buenos Aires.

Tres de Febrero was just across the street, so we stopped off to make the circuit on a custom-built pedaling vehicle.

Back near home, it was time for more ice cream.