Qualla: Sarmiento Park

Sarmiento Park: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Micah MacAllen from Travel Bums, Latin America, CC BY-SA 2.0. When the French landscape architect Carlos Thays stepped off the boat in Argentina in 1889, he had been hired for exactly one job: design a park in Córdoba. He had no idea that the rest of the country was about to become his canvas. The commission was Sarmiento Park, and the work he did here - laying out paths and lakes and a rose garden on a plateau above the city - launched a career that would shape the great parks of Buenos Aires and beyond. Thays began with Córdoba. So, in a sense, does the story of public green space in modern Argentina.

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Image: Micah MacAllen from Travel Bums, Latin America | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sarmiento Park: The Designer Who Stayed

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vanesa soledad camaño, CC BY-SA 3.0. Jules Charles Thays was born in Paris in 1849 and trained under the celebrated landscape architect Édouard André. In 1889 the Córdoba developer Miguel Crisol brought him across the Atlantic to build a green space for a new neighborhood spreading south of the rapidly growing city....

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Image: Vanesa soledad camaño | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sarmiento Park: A Park for the Schoolteacher President

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Biology9, CC BY-SA 3.0. Work began in 1890, and the park opened in 1911 under the name Parque Sarmiento. The choice honored Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the former president and tireless champion of public education, who had been born exactly a century before. The naming fit the place perfectly. This was...

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Image: Biology9 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sarmiento Park: Museums, Lakes, and a Mayor's Belly Flop

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit This photo was taken by Leandro A. Martínez., CC BY-SA 4.0. The park drew the city's cultural life to it. A German Argentine immigrant, José Scherer, founded a zoo here in 1915; the same year, the Provincial Museum of Fine Arts - later named for the painter Emilio Caraffa - rose facing the green. In 1918 came a natatorium and an amphithea...

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Image: This photo was taken by Leandro A. Martínez. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sarmiento Park: Still the City's Lungs

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CienAños, CC BY-SA 4.0. More than 25,000 people now live in the neighborhood around the park, and after a stretch of overuse and tight budgets near the turn of the century, the grounds were renewed. The zoo was refurbished and reopened in 2006, and in 2023 it was reimagined entirely as a Biodiversity Pa...

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Image: CienAños | CC BY-SA 4.0