The province of Mendoza offers wonderful landscapes such as the immensity of the Andes Mountains or the captivating palette of colors that it delivers during the fall. It also contains numerous monuments that remember San Martin’s deeds and historical sites unknown to more than one inhabitant. For this reason, a Tik-Tok account began to develop content so that people know the background of the various emblematic places that we pass through daily.
This is Street Stories, a project that has already exceeded 13,000 followers on the renowned social network and that has long been educationally explaining the history of monuments and relevant sites in the province. The access condor, the airplane roundabout, the avenue or the Gómez building, are some of the stories that managed to gather a large number of views due to the didactic format.
“Why is Olive Bridge called Olive Bridge?” states one of the publications that has already collected more than 200 thousand views. “There are few people from Mendoza who know the history of his name. Almost two centuries ago, neither the roundabout nor the virgin stood out in the place, but rather a large flour mill belonging to Pablo Olive who arrived in the province in 1800. In reality, the last name was Olivé because it was French,” maintains the story, which closes by informing that the current name derived from a bridge destroyed by a landslide that the Government refused to rebuild and the immigrant ended up developing it on his own.
Myths and mysteries of the Park Gates
Another of the stories that captivated the attention of users is that of the Gates of the General San Martín Park. According to Historias Callejeras, the idea of the governor, Emilio Civit, was to create a small France from Argentina. For that “he sent his cousin Juan Molina Civit to Glasgow, to buy the cast iron gates in 1907. The Gates correspond to Model No. 900, from the sixth edition of Walter MacFarlane’s catalog and weigh 47 tons. In the case of Mendoza, the model with moons was acquired, which were hidden by some spikes that were placed later, which generated the legend in the local area that the Gates had been commissioned by the Turkish Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, but it is a myth”.
And he adds: “The emblematic monument was not intervened until 1990. On that date the streetlights were replaced and the structure was repaired by casting missing pieces. Four years later it was repainted in its original colors. After a long journey that began with a study in 2008 and had several threats, on October 11, 2013, its last restoration was inaugurated, by Miguel Marchionni from Mendoza, who was also in charge of the last restoration in 2022.
