Centro Cultural Recoleta

This guide to Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires opens with a reversal: for roughly a century, these graceful colonnades sheltered not artists but the destitute of the city. It traces the building back to a Franciscan convent built in the 1730s, its later use as the city's first Hospital de Clínicas, and the mid-1800s decision to move the city's banned street beggars indoors into its empty halls. Architect Juan Antonio Buschiazzo, who was reshaping fashionable Recoleta just outside these walls, added dormitories, a bakery, laundries, and in 1881 the pink neo-Gothic chapel whose apse still glows over the plaza today.