Buffo Chapel

Buffo Chapel

The chapel is situated in Unquillo, 7km from the center of the city.

It was built in 1941 because Guido Buffo decided to make a chapel to hold his

wife and daughter’s corpses. It was made 1941 and it took 9 years to finish it. It

was complete in 1951.

To build the chapel, Guido took the idea from an own experience in his young

life. He saw in his garden a poppy flower with its envelope injured. Then he

opened it and found a broken and rotten seeds, and with that he saw another

perfectly healthy seeds. There he imagined those seeds in a bigger size. He

built that poppy flower shaped chapel with a dome and a bell tower.

The chapel was built by Guido Buffo. He was a musician, inventor, scientist,

writer, painter, sculptor, astronomer, seismologist, educator, philosopher and a

researcher of botany and zoology. He was a great lover of art and culture.

He bought the plot while he lived in Buenos Aires to enjoy that place with his

family, and then they moved to Quebrada Los Quebrachitos. In 1931 his wife

died because she had tuberculosis and 10 years later, his daughter suffered the

same fate. Because of that he built the chapel to hold his wife and daughter’s

corpses. In 1960 he died and he was buried with his loved ones.

The Chapel has 3 pendulums. Guido Buffo was very interested about Foucault’s

Pendulum* since 1902, when he saw in France an exposition of one of this

gadget in the National Pantheon in Paris.

In 1941 Buffo installed the first pendulum in the chapel and with it he took a

thousand of annotations. Then he installed the second pendulum in 1956, and

in the same year he installed the third device. With this gadgets he could notice

earthquakes 48 or 72 hours before the earthquakes took place in the Earth's

surface.

The chapel was renewed in 2014 by the professionals Marcela Mammana

(restorer and mural specialist) and the architect Javier Correa (historic build

restorer).

Cátedra Inglés Técnico 7º “A” Echenique Lucas; Escribal Lucas