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Villa Ocampo
Villa Ocampo is the erstwhile house of Victoria Ocampo (1890 1979), one of Latin America's greatest cultural figures, founder and director of Sur magazine. The house is located in San Isidro, in the Argentine province of Buenos Aires, approximately 30 km north of the city of Buenos Aires.
Originally the summer house of the Ocampo family, it became Victoria Ocampo's permanent residence in 1940. The house is famous for its list of distinguished visitors who came to Argentina invited by Victoria: Rabindranath Tagore, Igor Stravinsky, Le Corbusier, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Federico Garcia Lorca, Andre Malraux, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Saint-John Perse (Alexis Leger) among many others. Villa Ocampo was also a regular meeting place for Argentine writers, among them Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, who met there for the first time in 1931.
The Villa was built in 1891 by Manuel Ocampo, Victorias father. Its architecture is eclectic, combining influences of British and French origin. The house is surrounded by a 11,000 m historical garden and hosts an important collection of art, furnishings and a library of 12,000 books, photographs, letters and personal papers of Victoria Ocampo.
The house has been owned by UNESCO since 1973. It was fully restored in 2003 and is now a cultural center open to the public.
External links
UNESCO Villa Ocampo official website
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Villa Ocampo
