Iglesia y Convento de Santo Domingo Since late colonial times,
the mid-18th-century Dominican church (also known as Iglesia de
Nuestra Señora del Rosario) at Avenida Belgrano and Defensa has
witnessed some of Argentine history’s most dramatic events. It
still displays banners captured by Viceroy Santiago Liniers from
the Highlanders Regiment No. 71 during the 1806 British
invasion, and the exterior shows combat damage from the British
occupation of 1807. Near the church entrance, an eternal flame
burns near sculptor Héctor Ximenes’s Mausoleo de Belgrano
(1903), the crypt of Argentina’s second-greatest hero; Belgrano
was an indifferent soldier, but he did design the Argentine
flag. Following independence, President Bernardino Rivadavia
secularized the church, making it a natural history museum and
turning one of its towers into an astronomical observatory. In
1955, during the coup against Juan Perón, anticlerical Peronists
set it afire. © Wayne Bernhardson from Moon Argentina, 3rd
edition