Nueva Córdoba Guide: Paseo del Buen Pastor, Los Capuchinos & Palacio Ferreyra

Laid out at the end of the nineteenth century on the high barrancas south-east of the colonial grid so that Córdoba's Belle Époque families could build mansions beside a new Parisian-style park, Nueva Córdoba is today both the city's liveliest university student district and the home of its Media Legua de Oro Cultural ("Cultural Golden Half-Mile"). You can walk the entire route down Avenida Hipólito Yrigoyen in an afternoon.

1. Paseo del Buen Pastor & Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón (Los Capuchinos)

• Paseo del Buen Pastor (Av. Hipólito Yrigoyen 325): Built between 1897 and 1906 as a chapel, convent, and correctional asylum for women run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, this whole block was sensitively transformed in 2007 into an open-air cultural plaza. Preserving the Neo-Classical 1901 Greek-cross chapel (now an exhibition gallery whose wall frescoes were painted by Manuel Coutaret and Father Emiliano Gómez Clara) and a memory trail honouring women political prisoners who escaped in May 1975, its grassy terraces and choreographed musical water fountains are the favourite afternoon gathering spot in Nueva Córdoba.
• Iglesia de los Capuchinos (Built 1926 to 1934): Rising immediately across Calle Buenos Aires from the Buen Pastor fountains, the Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús was designed by Italian painter, architect, and photographer Augusto Ferrari. Cast in polychrome reinforced concrete with expressive sculptures of moons, angels, and atlantes, its architecture encodes a spiritual journey: the left bell tower is deliberately truncated and unfinished (representing human imperfection and matter that dies), while the right needle spire pierces the sky at forty metres (representing the soul ascending to God). Inside, look up at the vaulted ceiling painted in ultramarine blue with the exact gold-leaf star map of Córdoba's night sky across the four seasons.

2. The Museum Mile: Palacio Ferreyra, Museo Caraffa & Museo Dionisi

• Palacio Ferreyra / Museo Superior de Bellas Artes Evita (Av. Hipólito Yrigoyen 511): Three blocks downhill, enclosed within botanical gardens of magnolias and araucarias, stands Córdoba's grandest private residence. Designed in Paris by French architect Ernest Sanson and completed in 1916 for Dr Martín Ferreyra, the sixty-room Beaux-Arts palace centres on a twenty-metre marble entrance hall and displays 19th- and 20th-century masters including Fernando Fader, Emilio Caraffa, Francisco Vidal, Carlos Alonso, and Antonio Seguí.
• Museo Emilio Caraffa & Museo Palacio Dionisi: Facing Palacio Ferreyra across Plaza España sit the photography galleries of the 1924 Palacio Dionisi, the contemporary visual arts wings of the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Emilio Caraffa, and the natural history domes of the Museo de Ciencias Naturales.

3. Parque Sarmiento (1889) & Faro del Bicentenario

Directly behind the museums unfolds the 100-hectare Parque Sarmiento, landscaped beginning in 1889 by French urbanist Carlos Thays with a rose garden (Rosedal), boating lake, Greek amphitheatre, and the iron pavilion of the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition next to the concrete spiral of the Faro del Bicentenario; check the official Agencia Córdoba Cultura website for current museum hours.