Victoria Ocampo, who lived from 1890 to 1979, was one of the towering figures of Argentine culture. In 1931 she founded Sur, the literary magazine and publishing house that for decades served as a bridge between Argentine writers and the wider world, carrying European and North American literature into Spanish and Argentine voices outward. She was a writer, a patron, a translator and an impresario of ideas at a time when few women were permitted to be any of those things publicly. The house in San Isidro, originally her family's summer retreat, became her permanent home in 1940 and the physical heart of the cultural world she had built around herself.

The roll of visitors Ocampo drew to Argentina is almost difficult to believe. The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore stayed here. So did the composer Igor Stravinsky and the architect Le Corbusier, the novelists Albert Camus and Graham Greene, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, the French writers Andre Malraux and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, and the poet Saint-John Perse. It was here, too, in 1931, that two young Argentines named Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares met for the first time, the beginning of one of literature's great friendships and collaborations, two writers who would go on to invent stories and detective fictions together for decades. The villa so captured the imagination that the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet made it the model for the Blue Villa in his 1965 novel La Maison de rendez-vous, a final testament to how thoroughly Ocampo's house had lodged itself in the mind of the literary world.

The villa Victoria's father Manuel Ocampo built in 1891 is itself a conversation between worlds, its architecture eclectic, mixing British and French influences in a way that suited a family fluent in European culture. Eleven thousand square meters of historic gardens surround it. Inside, the house still holds the accumulated evidence of a life lived among books and ideas: a library of some twelve thousand volumes, along with art, furnishings, photographs, and the letters and personal papers in which Ocampo conducted her decades-long correspondence with the famous and the brilliant. To walk its rooms is to move through the working archive of a woman who treated culture as something you make happen, not something you wait for.

Ocampo ensured her house would outlive her in the most fitting way possible. In 1973 she gave Villa Ocampo to UNESCO, placing the gathering place of world literature into the hands of the world's cultural body. After a full restoration completed in 2003, the villa reopened as a cultural center, welcoming visitors from across the globe and continuing to host gatherings of distinguished groups, much as it did in Ocampo's day. It has hosted distinguished gatherings in its second life as well, among them a Fulbright scholars' meeting in 2011. The conversations have new participants now, but the purpose has not changed. A century after the first guests arrived, the house still does what its founder intended: it brings people together to think, to argue, and to create.