The Gaucho Festival

---

This morning after finding out that I could easily get back to Cordoba by bus from the festival in Jesus Maria at any hour of the night, I set out to buy my tickets to the gaucho show this evening. I queued in a well air-conditioned shopping centre in Cordoba for nearly an hour to buy my ticket at the auto-entrada.



In the afternoon I travelled to Jesus Maria by omnibus. The journey took one hour and passed through beautiful green pampas and when arriving into Jesus Maria the streets were dotted with parillas – barbecues. Once I arrived at Jesus Maria bus station I found a Pizzeria and had a delicious Pizza Mozzarella cooked on an open fire. I walked to the festival where the squares were lined with stalls selling gaucho related products including horse heads, cow hides and leather products, barbecues cooking big chunks of meat and men and women dancing together to traditional music. I bought a top quality leather belt to go with my jeans.



I timed it perfectly because I then had time to explore a nearby Jesuit Estancia before taking my seat in the amphitheatre at 6.30pm. The Jesuit Estancia was of Jesus Maria and had become a UNESCO site in 2000. I walked over a moat and found the Estancia in the grounds of a ranch - here the Jesuit order not only worshipped but educated people (Cordoba is the home of the first university in Argentina and its churches were all part of this), they grew crops on the land and reared animals – similar to our abbeys or monasteries back in the UK. This one was completely intact and the building had been turned into a museum showing how the Jesuit order lived, and it was attached to a beautiful church built in the Baroque style.



I saw the dining room where the black slaves would prepare the food, the bathrooms, the kitchens stocked with wheat and fruit from the land and a wine cellar, and lots of religious ornaments, old coins and a lot of Baroque architecture. I then walked around the gardens with a pond in the middle. Enjoying the shade I sat down on a log under the tree, wrote my diary with the sounds of Folkloric music softly playing from the nearby festival.



I queued up to take my seat in the amphitheatre to watch the gaucho show. About a hundred gauchos were lining up, proudly dressed in black hats, red neckerchiefs and black belts with swords hanging from the back – just like you see in the Spaghetti westerns. Once in the stadium the gauchos would sit behind their regions name labels – there were gauchos from each region in Argentina. Most of them were young, stylishly dressed and very handsome with not a hair out of place – the way people dress in the UK for a cowboy party but these cowboys took themselves very seriously.



The same basic sequence was repeated over and over again – about 15 gauchos on their horses would enter the stadium, each with a horse whip in his hand. They tied their horse to a pole in the centre of the stadium to make it angry, then would get on the horse and go around the stadium on the horse at top speed whipping the horse. The horse would then buckaroo and go crazy whilst the gaucho tried to hold onto and to stay on the horse. A bell would ring after about 10 seconds (like in a boxing match) and the gaucho would get a big round of applause if he was still on the horse once the bell rang. Most of the gauchos fell off after about 3 seconds and narrowly missed being jumped on by the horse. In between each gaucho showing his skills a tango would be played by the band on stage with the lyrics serving as a commentary to the gauchos performance. On each performance the commentator would interrupt the tango and say in an excited Argentinian voice (like the commentator does in a football match when a player is about to score a goal) ‘Aqui este x gaucho defendiendo su region de Salta.. .,’ – ‘Here is gaucho X defending his region and he is off to a fine start’. Some of the gauchos are not real gauchos but they just dress up as them like we dress up for Halloween as part of celebrating a tradition. I found it hilarious.



This scenario was played over again about 200 times along with the tango by which time I’d really had enough of horses, cowboys and the tango. It turns out the objective of the sport is for the gaucho to stay on the horse for the longest and withstand the horses’ violent behaviour after making it excitable and angry. It is quite a controversial sport apparently as they treat the horses badly and sometimes deny them food for days before the show.



I can only liken it to a rodeo bar - those bars people go to when they are drunk and have to sit on a plastic bull which shakes the person all over and the person holds onto the bulls’ ears trying not to fall off.

---