Hello everyone! On August 11th I hosted my first Meet Up: Paseo por Caminito (Walk through Caminito).
3 out of the 7 people that signed up attended: Daniel (who isn’t a member of Connect), @ValeriaA and @santiagoirale .
Caminito - “little path” in English - is a very touristic street museum full of colorful buildings, Tango dancers, restaurants with traditional Argentine food, paintings and sculptures. It used to be an old stream that was part of a river, after it dried up it formed part of a railroad, which closed after some time. Finally, in the 1950s, some neighbours decided to renew the area, and local artist Benito Quinquela Martín started painting the buildings.
It’s located in the neighborhood of La Boca -“The Mouth” in English-, where many immigrants that came from the Italian city of Genoa in the 19th century settled. Like most immigrants at that time, they usually settled in Conventillos, which are precarious buildings where each room was rented to groups of people, and other rooms, like bathrooms, were shared by all tenants. There are plenty of them in Caminito, painted in colorful bright colors, with small stores in what used to be the rooms that usually sell souvenirs or traditional Argentine products.
We met at 2 pm in the corner where La Perla is located, a traditional coffee shop/bar that opened in 1882.
From there, we walked to the Boca Juniors Football Stadium, also called La Bombonera - “the bonbon box” in English - which is only 4 blocks away from Caminito.
Some shops in this area combine their fanatism of Boca Juniors with the ambience of Caminito by being painted in blue and yellow, Boca Juniors colors, and having sculptures of well-known people in balconies or on the ground ready for photos.
We walked back to the area of Caminito, and entered the street, where we visited many Conventillos and some courtyards with shops.
While we walked we encountered a murga (street band) from Boca Juniors playing in a small park, and we stayed there for some time.
I took a video of the murga but the sound wasn’t captured so well, probably because its loudness, but I will leave it here just so everyone can see what it was like:
Since we didn’t take long to walk though Caminito, we had time to go to three museums in the area.
First, we went to the Historical Wax Museum. It is located metres away from Caminito in what used to be a family home, and was inaugurated in 1980. There, we found wax sculptures that simulated historical events, usual activities by people in the area or gauchos, wax portraits of historical figures, a lot of snakes and things they bit (all made of wax of course), a poster that taught how to dance to tango, a wall full of 2 pesos bills (which are no longer accepted since this April), and more.
Sadly, this museum isn’t accesible at all because there is a long set of stairs in the entrance, and a part of the museum is a narrow corridor.
Then, we went to the Benito Quinquela Martín museum. Benito Quinquela Martín was an Argentine painter known for his paintings of port scenes based on the daily life of La Boca. From the 1930s he began improving the neighbourhood by donating pieces of land and paintings in order to build a public school which used to work in one of the floors of the museum, a kindergarden, a theatre now called Theatre of the Riverside, a Pedriatic Dentistry Hospital, and more. Like I mentioned earlier, in the 1950s he painted the street known as Caminito, this was his last work outdoors and the one that had the biggest impact in the appearance of La Boca.
In 1938 he founded this museum, which shows paintings and sculptures made by other artists, proas (carved statues projecting forward at the front of ships), his paintings, personal objects, his former bathroom and kitchen that are painted in bright colors, like Caminito, and other rooms like his dormitory. The museum is located just one block from Caminito and most of it is accessible, the entrance has a ramp and it has a working elevator. However, the terrace, where some sculptures are, and the access to it aren’t accesible.
Finally, we visited the PROA Fountation, a private institution specialized in contemporary art. It has a bookstore and a cafe and is accesible. The exhibition Artists Film International was being shown, which consisted of contemporary video art made by artists of 15 different countries including Argentina, Latvia, the USA, Portugal, Germany, India and Norway.
To compensate for the bad sound quality of the murga video, here’s a video with more photos of the Meet Up and the Tango “Caminito”, the song Caminito got it’s name from, sung by Carlos Gardel. you can turn on the subtitles and translate it to any language:
You can see more photos taken by all the attendees in this album.
You can also click here for a list of places in Caminito and its surroundings.
I think that despite of how many we were it was a fun Meet Up as we could visit many interesting places, and I hope that my next Meet Ups are as good or even better.
Thank you for reading 
let grow my wish to go there once!
