Hello my Hive Friends, I hope you enjoy this post, it took me a while taking the photos and selecting the best ones, i tried really hard to get the best shots I could, today I will show you a well known part of my city, LA BOCA AND CAMINITO but from a different perspective which is not so "touristy" , between what the tourist gets to see and what reality actually is.
The La boca neighborhood was built by immigrants. Since it’s located around the river basin where the port used to be, most of its inhabitants were port workers, who used the left-over materials to build houses.
There were buildings with a shared bathroom, a shared kitchen and families lived in a tiny room… the living conditions were far from good. . The bright side of the story is that many of those families were able to move to better neighborhoods after, but that was just their “starting point” .
This is the "Nicolas Avellaneda" ferry bridge. It was 60 years without transporting passengers and in the year 2017 it began to do so again. It was inaugurated in 1914 and it was working until 1960, The official reopening of the bridge took place in September 2020.
Today it is a tourist attraction. The government painted an entire block with colors, honoring Benito Quinquela’s paintings, which were very colorful. And they showcase the houses where immigrants used to live.
Then you can see the port from the terrace of the Quinquela Martinez museum, the ticket to enter the museum is at will with a recommended price of 200 pesos (50 cents of a dollar)
I did not take many photos of Caminito, since there are several publications with his photos, but I decided to go a little deeper into the conventillos and in the dark part of Caminito
Let's start with the traditional part
As you can see, you can find many old artifacts in a very good state of preservation, others a little deteriorated, but in order to know how the inhabitants of Caminito lived at that time
As you walk the streets and enter the buildings, Benito Quinquela’s paintings are everywhere. As we were walking and I was just looking around aimlessly I laid my eyes on a mural that was kind of abandoned but I thought it was so beautiful. I saw the name of the artist ( it was signed). I thought it was really strange that in a place that is so touristy there was a work of art like this falling to pieces. I did some research on my way home and learned that the artist “Vicente Walter”. There are almost no records of his work, nothing on the internet. Just his work, there in the streets , on the walls… overshadowed by Benito Quinquela’s and completely neglected by the government who decided not to shed light on this guy’s work ( I thought it was pretty awesome)
and of course a bit of the housing structure, the narrow stairs,to take advantage of spaces and heights
And as I had also commented above, there is also the dark part of CAMINITO, where the houses do not have the best maintenance, and even some structures are affected by the passage of time.
You saw a few pictures of one of the houses (this is not how the house looked back in the day, it was painted when the government decided to turn all this are into "caminito" the tourist attraction.
But one block away you see the exact same architecture and housing style, but it's not a tourist attraction it's how people actually live cuz they can't afford to get better construction materials
To me personally was kind of hard seeing how people lived back in the day;knowing that entire families were cramped in a tiny room. But that wasn't so much the hard part, but seeing that the painted block was just one block. There rest of the neighborhood and the houses surroundings were the exact same houses, with no bright colors, actually no colors. Just run-down housing (which is how caminito used to be, only that now has a lot of colors). It felt like romanticizing poverty to me. I didn't like that part. I did enjoy seeing the work of the artists
And well guys, that was all for this first part of THE DARK SIDE OF LA BOCA Y CAMINITO.
I hope you enjoyed it as I enjoyed it, a big greeting to all
Interesting post and very nice place, looks like you capture it from every angle and it's awesome. 👍
Thank you very much, I tried to make it as original as possible, there are many publications of this place, it will be a second part soon!
Great pictures!
thank you!
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