Qualla: Paz Palace

Paz Palace: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kevin Gabbert - User: (WT-shared) Kevin James at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. José Camilo Paz commissioned the grandest house Buenos Aires had ever seen and never spent a single night in it. The founder of the newspaper La Prensa wanted a palace to match a Parisian dream, so he hired the French architect Louis Sortais and ordered the building raised with materials shipped from France, stone by stone, across the Atlantic. Construction dragged on from 1902, and Paz died in Monte Carlo in 1912, two years before the work was done. Sortais, his architect, died too without ever crossing the ocean to see his masterpiece. The Palacio Paz was finished in 1914 for a master who would never climb its marble stairs.

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Image: Kevin Gabbert - User: (WT-shared) Kevin James at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

Paz Palace: A House Built for a Ghost

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Napoletano, CC BY-SA 4.0. By any measure the building is staggering. Behind its long French facade facing Plaza San Martín lie roughly 12,000 square metres of construction spread across four storeys and some 140 rooms, halls, and galleries, making it the largest single-family residence ever built in the c...

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Image: Napoletano | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paz Palace: The Grand Salon and the Great Round Hall

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ferchulandia05, CC BY-SA 3.0. Inside, the rooms compete with the great houses of Europe. The Salón de Honor, a vast hall of marble and bronze, is crowned by a circular gallery and a dome lined with gold leaf, lit by a ring of windows. There are Louis XV and Louis XVI salons, a Renaissance dining room, smoking...

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Image: Ferchulandia05 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Paz Palace: From Mansion to Military Circle

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Napoletano (photo)Louis-Marie Henri Sortais (building), CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1938 the family sold the palace, and it was bought by the Círculo Militar, the Military Officers' Association, which has occupied it ever since. The club itself was older than the building, founded in 1880 by Nicolás Levalle, a decorated army officer who hoped a shared social ...

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Image: Napoletano (photo)Louis-Marie Henri Sortais (building) | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paz Palace: Crusader Mail and a Camera Crew

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richie Diesterheft, CC BY 2.0. One wing houses the Museo de Armas de la Nación, the National Arms Museum, opened in 1941 and considered Argentina's most important military museum. Across fifteen rooms its collection runs from chain-mail armour attributed to a Byzantine emperor around the year 1100, through cru...

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Image: Richie Diesterheft | CC BY 2.0