Buffo Chapel, a testimony of love

In the place of Los Quebrachitos, 35 km from the capital of Córdoba and 8 km from the city of Unquillo, is the Buffo Chapel, a construction on the hillside that pays homage to love. It is not just about architecture or its style, but about the history it keeps. In the Sierras Chicas de Córdoba, Guido Buffo set up his home and shared a time with his wife Leonor and daughter Eleonora.

A temple that moves
Guido Buffo was born in Treviso, Veneto, north of Italy in 1885. He was a multi-faceted artist and scientist, with huge plans to face a new destination on the other side of the Atlantic. Relax in Córdoba and then in Rosario, where he meets Leonor Allende, writer and journalist. They get married in 1914 and in 1917 their daughter Eleonora is born.
They arrive in Unquillo looking for the benefits of good weather to cope with the disease that afflicted both women. Next to a meandering stream that went down a slope of the place The Quebrachitos raise their home. But tuberculosis catches them, without giving them truce.

Guido Buffo sought to channel his pain and grief in the construction of the chapel, adjacent to his house, to house the remains of his beloved and his daughter. There he would also find space his own body, when he died in 1960.

He worked conscientiously for 10 years in the construction of the chapel and there he turned all his knowledge and beliefs into a kind of communion between art and love. A beautiful, moving and unique architecture brings together the painter´s worldview, where there are frescoes and symbols linked to astronomy, Renaissance art, physics and moments linked to the lives of the two women. To get there 35 steps separate it from the side of the road. A time of reflection and humility calls us when we start uploading them.

The trilogy God, love and intellect gave meaning to the life of the artist and is what is revealed in its interior, when the heavy ogival door is crossed. The atypical bell tower with a cross in low relief shows the absence of bell. Seen from the air, its dome is shaped like a flower of thistle and the circular windows of its cusp allow light to pass in a unique way. A Foucault pendulum is one of the most striking and rare objects for its time. The lighting and acoustics are designed to the millimeter, nothing is left to chance, to give it that heavenly and mystical tone that visitors can witness with just whispering, and be moved by this offering of love.