On Tuesday May 19th, we took an excursion to San Telmo to tour the Zanjon de Granados museum. The Zanjon, which means creek, was an abandoned house/property that was first bought with the intentions to invest to the neighborhood, however, the owner discovered a tunnel in the back of the house. The owner hired archeologists from the University of Buenos Aires and they found signs that the house was once used to run a colonial drainage system and ran to a creek.

 This is where water was filtered and cleaned of sediments.

You can see lighter spots where the archeologists broke through to explore the tunnel.

This ended up being one of the first private archeological works and it is very fascinating how this property was built on the southern creek that led to the river. The tunnel was separated by house so that each neighbor could privately use their tunnel. The entire restoration process took about 20 years and it is believed that it took about 50 years to tunnel the whole stream.

The tunnel that used to have cement walls for separation between neighbors homes. 

One house had a pile of trash clogged in their tunnel. After archeologists removed the trash one of the families bedroom collapsed into the basement.

In 1871, the house was bought out and drained and turned into a tenement house for mostly Italian immigrants. These immigrants were indentured servants in this house for almost 100 years. It was very interesting to be able to see first hand the changes that were made to convert the house from a drainage system over a creek into a slave tenement house. We could see how big rooms were turned into smaller rooms with bars on the windows and lower entrances.

The Zanjon requires a lot of funding from governments and events they host such as banquet and tours. The museum is not quite ready to be fully opened yet but is a great establishment for so much history and culture. All in all, we had the chance to learn a lot of history that pertains to Spanish America and developments of the unique mixture of culture between the Natives, Spanish and French from the Zanjon.

Smaller rooms for slaves with bars on the windows.

You can still see the brick and adobe from the original house.

Something you won’t normally see, the bottom of a well.