Qualla: Evita Museum

Evita Museum: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Suzko, CC BY-SA 3.0. In one glass case rests a small national identity document, the kind every Argentine carries. This one belonged to Eva Peron, and it was the first ever issued to a woman in Argentina. She used it to cast a vote in the country's 1951 elections, the first in which Argentine women could vote at all, and she did it from a hospital bed, already gravely ill with the cancer that would kill her the following July. The card sits in a building that tells her whole story, a Spanish Colonial mansion in the Palermo neighborhood that she once turned into a shelter for the poor. To walk through it is to follow one woman from a small farming town to the center of a nation's heart, and into its longest argument with itself.

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Image: Suzko | CC BY-SA 3.0

Evita Museum: The House That Changed Hands

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roberto Fiadone, CC BY-SA 4.0. The building has lived several lives. Known as the Carabassa Building, it was completed in 1923 to a design by the architect Estanislao Pirovano, who built it as a residence for the Carabassa family, a family of bankers. After 1941 it passed to a series of charitable organization...

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Image: Roberto Fiadone | CC BY-SA 4.0

Evita Museum: A Museum Half a Century in the Making

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roberto Fiadone, CC BY-SA 4.0. It took a long time for Eva to get her museum. In the 1990s a movement formed to dedicate the old Carabassa Building to her memory. Renovation began in 1998 under an initiative of President Carlos Menem, who declared the site a Historical Landmark of Argentina and, in 1999, signe...

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Image: Roberto Fiadone | CC BY-SA 4.0

Evita Museum: The Woman in the Collection

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashanterius, CC BY-SA 3.0. The exhibits move through her life in order, and the order is its own kind of drama. The first room is given to her childhood in Los Toldos, a town on the pampas where she was born poor and illegitimate. From there the story turns to her early career as a radio and film actress, ...

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Image: Ashanterius | CC BY-SA 3.0

Evita Museum: Still Argued Over

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roberto Fiadone, CC BY-SA 4.0. Few figures divide a country the way Eva Peron still divides Argentina. To the descamisados, the shirtless poor she championed, she was a saint who gave them dignity and a voice. To the aristocracy and the military that overthrew her husband, she was a demagogue, and after her de...

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Image: Roberto Fiadone | CC BY-SA 4.0