No single architect can claim this building. Work began in 1582 under the name it still carries, the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption. In 1598 the master builder Gregorio Ferreira and the stonemason Juan Rodríguez set to work with stone, brick, and lime, durable materials chosen for a structure meant to outlast its makers. A carpenter framed the first roof; another man oversaw the firing of thirty thousand clay tiles. Then the Jesuits arrived with grander ambitions. Giovanni Battista Primoli laid out the floor as a Latin cross, modeled on the Church of the Gesù in Rome. In 1758 the Franciscan friar Vicente Muñoz designed and raised the great dome. The cathedral had been consecrated in 1706, finished in its essentials by 1758, and crowned with bell towers only in 1787. Each generation built atop the last, and the seams still show.

Churches of this era were supposed to face Jerusalem, the high altar oriented toward the holy city. Córdoba's cathedral quietly breaks the rule. Its main façade looks east-southeast, and the altar points northwest rather than the northeast that tradition demanded, an architectural irregularity that sets it apart from its contemporaries. The building occupies an entire block on the west side of Plaza San Martín, the old Plaza Mayor at the city's heart. A narrow alley called Santa Catalina separates it from the neighboring Cabildo, the colonial town hall. Behind the church lies the small Plazoleta del Fundador, where a bronze statue of Jerónimo Luis de Cabrera, who founded Córdoba in 1573, stands in patinated green. From the air, the cathedral and the Cabildo together mark the precise center of the old city.

Step inside and the eye climbs. A high barrel vault runs the length of the central nave, thick with carved and gilded moldings, much of it in gold leaf. Light falls through deep lunettes set into the curve of the ceiling. The main altar is worked in embossed silver carried down from Upper Peru, colonial Bolivia, where the mines of the Andes fed the wealth of the empire. Statues of saints line the nave, many of them articulated and dressed in real cloth. The great entrance doors and the choir stalls were carved by Jesuit hands from missionary cedar. Later flourishes kept arriving: a tabernacle donated in 1804, frescoes painted in the early twentieth century by Emilio Caraffa and others, and the figure of Christ the Redeemer added to the top of the façade in 1901, cast in a Paris foundry and shipped across the Atlantic to stand above an Argentine plaza.

The narthex and crypts of the cathedral are a roll call of the people who made Córdoba and the nation around it. General José María Paz, a one-armed soldier of the independence wars, lies here beside his wife Margarita Weild. Nearby rests Dean Gregorio Funes, the priest and politician who chronicled the early republic. In the crypts lie Bishop Hernando de Trejo y Sanabria, who founded the University of Córdoba, the oldest in Argentina, and Friar Mamerto Esquiú, remembered for a famous sermon on the national constitution. To walk past these tombs is to walk past the scaffolding of a country still being assembled. The cathedral's treasury once held crowns set with diamonds and pearls to adorn statues of the Virgin, though part of that collection was looted in the final decades of the twentieth century, a quiet wound the building still carries.