¡Hola a todos!: January 29, 2011 Museo de América

When a group of us decided to go to Museo de América this weekend, all I knew was that it was a museum of artifacts and treasure taken from the Americas. It turns out that there is some treasure, but the most interesting aspect of the visit was the newness of the perspective. I can't exactly explain the difference... or what specifically was so intriguing, but it was very interesting to view the history of the colonization of the Americas through a Spanish lens.

The tower part of the museum.

That massive metal thing supposedly holds a very expensive restaurant in the disk at the top.

Main staircase within the museum.

In this first section of the museum there were a lot of excerpts from Christopher Columbus's journals and from many of his letters. Putting this one here for any of you who want to practice your Spanish - and also because I thought it was kind of cool how I ended up reflected in it. :)

So, apparently, with the discovery of the Americas, Europeans went nuts. Those that came back told exaggerated stories that were then blown up even further until all at once both the people and animals of the New World were entirely wild, alien, and often monstrous. These illustrations were actual (if hyperbolic and prejudiced) attempts to represent the people and creatures of the newly discovered continents. I would LOVE to know how the legend of headless natives with eyes, noses, and mouths on their torso got started.

Explorers returning to Europe described the American Indians as tall - and this was what people imagined. (I hope no one takes offense to me using "American Indians" instead of "Native Americans" or "Native American Indians" or "the indigenous peoples of the New World." The idea of "Native American" just doesn't translate into Spanish - and honestly doesn't make that much sense in English, either, if you think about it. Someone "native" to an area was born in that place. Everyone born in the Americas is a native American. Europeans refer to the indigenous tribes of the New World as "American Indians" and sometimes even just "Indians." It can get quite confusing, but it still makes more sense than saying "Native American.")

The caption on the above illustration describes it as "The Monster of Buenos Aires." I am disappointed, everyone. I never got to see one when I was there...

Yep, the New World had dragon... cow... things, too.

The second (and possibly my favorite) part of the museum: the map room! Maps fascinate me, especially old and often inaccurate ones. The one shown above, which was huge, extending up to the ceiling, isn't obviously too far off, but it's still fun to see how everything was labeled. With this and some of those that follow, I strongly encourage you to click on the images. It will open it up bigger for you to see.

Give me a map of South America and what do I do first? Find Buenos Aires. :) Here it is written as Buenos Ayres. If you don't see it right away, follow the Rio de la Plata inland. Right across the water on what is now Uruguay, you can see Colonia. Nikki and I went there last semester en route to Punta del Este which is much farther out along the coast than Montevideo, also marked here. I don't remember seeing Punta del Este labeled on this map, which might be why I didn't zoom out enough to include it. But isn't it so cool that so many place names were exactly the same in 1776 as they are today? I mean, it's much less impressive when you look at many cities in Europe and even, to some degree, North America, but still...

Córdoba! La Pampa! They're written as Cordova and Los Pampas here, but today they are their own provinces. We had a blast visiting the city of Córdoba one weekend... It's about as close as you can get to the exact center of Argentina. There is also a road above marked as "Ruta que sigue el Correo desde Buenos Ayres a Santiago de Chile..." - the mail route from Buenos Aires to Santiago, Chile.

Here we have the bottom tip of Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, and the Islas Malvinas. They are stilled called the Malvinas in Argentina today, although they have been a British territory forever and are known as the Falkland Islands by the rest of the world.

Okay, finally moving onto new maps! Virginia! Complete with the Chesapeake Bay!

Okay, so this my first experience playing with Canon PhotoStitch software. This is a composite of four photos that the software then stitched together to form one large panoramic image. You can see where it made a mistake up by where the crest is in the upper left hand corner, but what seems like a mistake where the land on the map kind of leads off into nothing up near that same corner, is not a mistake. The map is just incomplete.

This is another composite image. There is a mistake at the seam in the top middle, but other than that, I think it came out quite well. These maps are works of art. You should definitely click on this and the one before to see the larger, higher quality image. :)