National Historic Museum

This guide to the National Historic Museum in Buenos Aires opens with a priest pulling old paintings off a church wall in the Bolivian Andes in 1883, and two bundles of cloth tumbling out from behind them. Decades earlier, General Manuel Belgrano had handed banners to a local priest for safekeeping after a defeat at Vilcapugio, and the flags vanished for two generations along with the secret of where they were hidden, resurfacing only by accident during routine work on the church walls. Stand here and consider how a lawyer turned soldier's banners spent most of a century simply missing.