Basílica del Santísimo Sacramento

This guide to the Basílica del Santísimo Sacramento in Buenos Aires opens with an odd sequence: the basement was finished and consecrated five years before the sanctuary above it held its first mass. It follows Mercedes Castellanos de Anchorena, a widow from Buenos Aires high society who laid the foundation stone on her own land in 1908 and insisted her crews finish what lay underground before a single wall rose above the street. Two French architects modeled the church above on a cathedral in Angoulême, mixing Romanesque arches, Gothic spires and Byzantine mosaic, with materials shipped in from Germany, Italy and Belgium.