The Spanish theater producer and actress María Guerrero arrived in Argentina in 1897 with her company, and her adaptations of the Spanish classics made her a sensation. A commercial success at the Teatro Odeón, she toured the country's theaters and decided Buenos Aires deserved a grand house of her own making. In 1918, she and her husband, Fernando Díaz de Mendoza, set aside part of their fortune to build it. The ambition caught the eye of high society and of King Alfonso XIII of Spain himself, who contributed to the project by commissioning artisanal fixtures, materials, and stagecraft. Built in Spanish baroque style, the theater was named for Miguel de Cervantes, Spain's legendary novelist and dramatist.

On 5 September 1921 the Cervantes opened with a production of Lope de Vega's La dama boba, The Foolish Lady. But Buenos Aires already had a great many theaters, and a new rival was rising fast: radio. As broadcasting spread across Argentina, the Cervantes saw its audience drain away, and by 1926 Guerrero and her husband were forced to auction the institution they had built only five years earlier. The story might have ended there. Instead, the assistant director of the National Music Conservatory, Enrique García Velloso, lamented the loss and persuaded President Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear to step in. Alvear's wife, Regina Pacini, was a former opera singer and a devoted patron of the arts - and the ailing Cervantes was reborn as the National Stage Theater. The National Comedy Theater made it home in 1933.

Few buildings in Buenos Aires announce their heritage so openly. The Cervantes was raised in Spanish baroque style, and King Alfonso XIII's contributions meant that fixtures, materials, and elements of stagecraft were commissioned and shipped from Spain expressly for it. The result is a theater that feels transplanted - an homage to the country María Guerrero had left, set down two blocks from Argentina's grandest opera house, the Teatro Colón. Its very name is a tribute to Miguel de Cervantes, and its opening production reached even further back into the Spanish canon, to the Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega. To walk into the Cervantes is to step into a deliberate act of cultural memory: a Spanish actress, in a new country, building a monument to the literature that had made her career.

In 1961 a massive fire nearly destroyed the Cervantes. Out of the disaster came a thorough modernization, including a seventeen-story annex, while the main hall was rebuilt to its original specifications, and the renovated theater reopened in 1968. The building still wears María Guerrero's ambitions in its details. Her name graces the principal hall, the María Guerrero Salon, whose stage spans 456 square meters and turns on a twelve-meter rotating platform that can be extended further still. The room seats 860, more than five hundred of them in the galleries. A smaller hall, the Orestes Caviglia Salon, holds 150 for chamber concerts, and the multipurpose Luisa Vehíl Salon glitters with extensive gold-leaf decoration - a flourish worthy of the woman who dreamed the place into being.

What began as a private folly became a public institution. The advocacy of Lito Cruz - actor, director, and one of the best-known figures in Argentine film and theater - helped push a National Theater Law through Congress in 1997, securing yearly subsidies for the dramatic arts and confirming the Cervantes as an official national entity. Today it stands as the national stage and comedy theater of Argentina, a designated National Historic Monument. Stand on Córdoba Avenue and look up at its ornate Spanish facade, and it is hard to imagine that this confident landmark was once a failing house sold off in defeat. María Guerrero lost her theater. The nation kept it.