Qualla: Colegio Nacional de Monserrat

Colegio Nacional de Monserrat: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Véronique Debord-Lazaro, CC BY-SA 2.0. More than eleven hundred children sit the entrance exam every year, and fewer than a quarter walk through the door. That is the reality of getting into the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat, a school in central Córdoba that has been selecting and shaping students since 1687. A priest founded it by giving away everything he owned. A Spanish king signed off on it. For its first three centuries it admitted only boys. The story of this school is, in miniature, the story of who Argentina decided its education was for, and the slow, contested widening of that circle.

Image: Véronique Debord-Lazaro | CC BY-SA 2.0

Colegio Nacional de Monserrat: The Priest Who Gave It All Away

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nicolás Riofrio, CC BY-SA 3.0. On August 1, 1687, the Society of Jesus founded the Real Colegio Convictorio de Nuestra Señora de Monserrat, a royal boarding school in Córdoba. Its founder and first director was Father Ignacio Duarte Quirós, a local priest who volunteered for the work and donated all his proper...

Image: Nicolás Riofrio | CC BY-SA 3.0

Colegio Nacional de Monserrat: A Block the World Decided to Keep

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Venteveo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk the streets around the Monserrat and you are inside the Jesuit Block of Córdoba, the Manzana Jesuítica, a single city block of seventeenth and eighteenth century buildings that UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site on November 28, 2000. The school stands alongside the old un...

Image: Venteveo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Colegio Nacional de Monserrat: The Pampero and the Politics of a School Paper

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bluepsy, CC BY-SA 3.0. A school can carry uncomfortable history, and Monserrat carries some honestly. Its student newspaper, El Pampero, later renamed Pampero Cordubensis, was founded by the writer Enrique Osés, who became a prominent voice of the Argentine far right. Under his hand the paper grew into...

Image: Bluepsy | CC BY-SA 3.0

Colegio Nacional de Monserrat: The First Forty-Four

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fabricio Zanichelli, CC BY-SA 3.0. From its founding until 1998, the Monserrat was a school for boys only, full stop, for three hundred and eleven years. The change came against resistance. In May 1997 the National University of Córdoba's governing council ruled that students could enroll regardless of gender, and...

Image: Fabricio Zanichelli | CC BY-SA 3.0