Museo de Ciencias Naturales

Patagonian explorer Francisco Pascasio Moreno donated his personal collections of anthropological, archaeological, and paleontological artifacts to Argentina’s premier natural history museum, which opened in 1888 under his own lifetime directorship. Today, more than 400,000 visitors per annum view at least some of the 2.5 million items in its 21 exhibition halls, which also deal with botany geology, zoology, and other fields.

The four-story building is a monument to its era, its exterior a hybrid of Greek regional styles with indigenous American—Aztec and Incaic—flourishes. Home to the university’s natural sciences department, its interior also contains classrooms, libraries, offices, workshops, and storage space. That said, the museum’s public displays have still not evolved far beyond taxonomy, and the 19th-century Darwinism of their creator.

The Museo de Ciencias Naturales (Paseo del Bosque 1900, tel. 0221/425-7744, www.fcnym.unlp.edu.ar/museo, US$1 pp for those over 12 years of age) is open 10 a.m.–6 p.m. daily except for Mondays and the New Year’s, May Day, and Christmas Day holidays. There are guided tours at 2 and 4 p.m. weekdays except Monday, and hourly on weekends from 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m.