Opera del Pampa

We departed Colonia somewhat reluctantly as the weather had determined it was time for us to go. There wasn’t much to do in the rain so we went back to Buenos Aires. This time, we used a ferry service called Colonia Express, which was joyously lacking the lineups and craziness of the Buquebus. Bizarrely, we did not go through any customs and just had to have some of our luggage scanned. So, instead of wandering around Colonia in the rain, we shopped in trendy Palmero in Buenos Aires, which is a district kind of like the Kensington area in Calgary, only way bigger but not any cooler (I think Kensington is nicer).

We only have so many free nights in BA and so we’re making efforts to see things both day and night usually reserving the mornings to email and sitting by the pool. So, we booked seats at Opera del Pampa in the evening. The show was located at La Rural, an exhibition site long used for rich landowners to show and sell cattle. The grounds are impressively large and showcase the wealth that once drove the economy of Argentina to being one of the richest countries in the world.

We walked to the grounds in our rather dressed-up attire strutting our stuff through some of the slightly shadier streets in our neighborhood. It started with a social style mingle before the show with opportunities for pictures and touring the exhibits and booths while being entertained with wine and empanadas.

The show itself was held in a large outdoor stadium with seating on either side of a large ring and a stage on one end.

Opera del Pampa is about the history of Buenos Aires and Argentina, performed with narration and music, en espanol. Fortunately, we had studied some of the history ourselves and could loosely follow). There are dancers and singers and actors but the riders and their horses steal the show. Their skills are impressive. The riders re-enact battle scenes with cavalry charges that, with a little relaxing of the mind, take you away from your seat in the stands and place scarily in the middle of it all.

One scene depicted a group of Indians seeing soldiers off in the distance. One rider, while still on his horse, had it gently lower it’s backside down to the ground and slowly work its way in a deft motion eventually lying on its side on the ground with the “Indian” crouching beside it. This was what I thought, an astounding maneuver with a horse I had never seen before.

Theatrics on the stage.



A little too much dancing.



Soldiers on teh charge!!!



The old west....Argentina style.

At the end, there was a huge parilla barbeque that we wished we had attended. The big dinner after the show was an option but seeing as how we were uncertain about what the show was going to ammount, we erroniously opted against it. The thing we learned from this is that when you are on holiday in a difficult and expensive place to get to, you should opt in for everything you can.