The Centre

You can see most of the sights in Córdoba’s compact centre in a couple of days. The city’s historic core, or microcentro, wrapped around leafy Plaza San Martín, contains all the major colonial buildings that sealed the city’s importance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its elegant Cabildo (colonial headquarters), now houses the city museum, which sits conveniently adjacent to the cathedral, one of the oldest in the country. Nearby, beyond a handsome Baroque convent, the Monasterio de Santa Teresa is a group of several well-preserved Jesuit buildings, including the temple and university, that form the Manzana Jesuítica (“Jesuits’ Block”). East of the Plaza San Martín, the eighteenth-century home of Governor Sobremonte (and the city’s oldest standing residential building) has been turned into the Museo Histórico Provincial, and contains some outstanding colonial paintings, while some interesting examples of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Argentine art are on display in a splendid French-style house, the Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes, a couple of blocks northwest of the plaza.

The city’s regular Hispano-American grid, centred on Plaza San Martín, is upset only by the winding La Cañada brook a few blocks west of the centre, on either side of which snakes one of the city’s main thoroughfares, acacia-lined Avenida Marcelo T. de Alvear, which becomes Avenida Figueroa Alcorta after crossing Deán Funes. Street names change and numbering begins level with the Cabildo.