Aarón Félix Martín
de Anchorena Castellanos
Aarón Félix Martín de Anchorena Castellanos (Buenos Aires, November 5, 1877 - Estancia Anchorena, Colonia, Uruguay, February 24, 1965) was an Argentine aristocrat who stood out as a pioneer aviator in the Río de la Plata and as a rancher in Uruguay. Aaron de Anchorena was born on November 5, 1877 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and was one of the members of the wealthy Anchorena family, traditional ranchers of the country. He was the eighth of the ten children of the marriage between Nicolás Hugo Anchorena Arana - nephew of Tomás Manuel de Anchorena, prominent figure of Argentine independence- and Mercedes Castellanos de Anchorena, Papal Countess - daughter of Aarón Castellanos-. He received baptism on December 15, 1877 in the Basilica Nuestra Señora de la Merced, in Buenos Aires, his godparents being Fabián Gómez and Elena Serivener. From a very young age Aaron felt concern about motorsport and aviation. In 1901 he participated in the first car race held in Buenos Aires at the National Hippodrome located in the Bajos de Belgrano and came in first place driving a Panhard Levassor. In 1902, Aaron traveled through Patagonia on horseback with the support of Argentine President Julio Roca. There he met with the expert Francisco Pascasio Moreno and reached Lake Nahuel Huapi and Victoria Island.
Anchorena with her push gave life to the Nahuel Huapi and Victoria Island. Also in 1902 he managed to get the Directorate of Lands and Colonies to give him a lease on Victoria Island, and in 1907 Congressional Act No. 5267 granted him the usufruct for life, although in 1911 Anchorena gave up her rights. Anchorena was a pioneer and promoted tourism in this Andean area. He introduced exotic animals such as pheasants or deer, created a nursery and forested with more than two thousand species of trees from all over the world. He also built a shipyard in Puerto Anchorena from where the first ships were launched. He also built houses for the administration, the dock, pens, laid out roads and built a drum. In 1905 he flew with Alberto Santos Dumont and also with Paul Tissandier. On December 25, 1907, with the legendary balloon "Pampero", which he had brought from France, Aaron made the first flight with Jorge Newbery to cross the Río de la Plata from the premises of the Sociedad Sportiva Argentina to Uruguay.3 But Anchorena had another concern: to settle in the department of Colonia, Uruguay, as a rancher. His mother advanced him part of the inheritance, with which he acquired 11,000 hectares of field next to the mouth of the San Juan River, where he began as an agricultural producer; Doña María Mercedes feared that her son would die in flight, and urged him to settle down.4 Anyway, Anchorena participated in the founding of the Argentine Aero Club at the beginning of 1908, which he came to preside over. During the stay he developed a very varied activity. He promoted agricultural production, which he exported to Argentina and Europe. But in addition, he had his residence built in a combination of Norman and Tudor styles; and the surrounding park was entrusted to the German landscape designer Hermann Bötrich, who with great care selected the exotic species with which he embellished it. Anchorena managed to have 300 employees during her stay, of which 100 were dedicated to the care of the park.
The Argentine Army (Spanish: Ejército Argentino, EA) is the land force branch of the Armed Forces of the Argentine Republic and the senior military service of Argentina. Several armed expeditions were sent to the Upper Peru (now Bolivia), Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile to fight Spanish forces and secure Argentina's newly gained independence. The most famous of these expeditions was the one led by General José de San Martín, who led a 5000-man army across the Andes Mountains to expel the Spaniards from Chile and later from Perú. While the other expeditions failed in their goal of bringing all the dependencies of the former Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata under the new government in Buenos Aires, they prevented the Spaniards from crushing the rebellion. During the civil wars of the first half of the nineteenth century, the Argentine Army became fractionalized under the leadership of the so-called caudillos ("leaders" or "warlords"), provincial leaders who waged a war against the centralist Buenos Aires administration. However, the Army was briefly re-unified during the war with the Brazilian Empire (1824–1827). It was only with the establishment of a constitution (which explicitly forbade the provinces from maintaining military forces of their own) and a national government recognized by all the provinces that the Army became a single force, absorbing the older
provincial militias. The Army went on to fight the War of the Triple Alliance in the 1860s together with Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay. After that war, the Army became involved in Argentina's Conquista del Desierto ("Conquest of the Desert"): the campaign to occupy Patagonia and root out the natives, who conducted looting raids throughout the country. After 1880 the Army sought to become a professional force without active involvement in politics, even though many a political figure -President Julio Argentino Roca, for example- benefitted from a past military career. The Army prevented the fall of the government in a number of Radical-led uprisings. Meanwhile, the military in general and the Army, in particular, contributed to develop Argentina's unsettled southern frontier and its nascent industrial complex. The main foreign influence during this period was, by and large, the Prussian (and then German) doctrine. Partly because of that, during both World Wars most of the officers supported the Germans, more or less openly, while the Argentine Navy favored the British instead.
Anchorena is the surname of an old landowning family settled in the eighteenth century on the Río de la Plata dedicated to trade and the purchase of large tracts of land. They were classified as large landowners because of the place of prominence they occupied in the export-type market and in production within their large tracts of land. This positioning collaborated in the growth of the family and in turn led to the contribution of money to the financing of military campaigns in the viceregal era, in pursuit of independence and then with the purchase and development of the entire livestock sector. The family came from the Baztán Valley in Navarre. The founder of the family was Juan Esteban de Anchorena — son of Domingo de Anchorena and Juana Zandueta—, who settled in Buenos Aires in 1768; he had been born in Pamplona in 1734, and married Ramona Josefa de Anaya. Among his children were Juan José Cristóbal, Mariano Nicolás and Tomás Manuel de Anchorena. The social ascent from the merchant class - simple shelves - to that of the neighbors - integrated by the Patrician families descendants of the first settlers- it became possible with the marriage of the founder of the family in the Governorate of the Río de la Plata with a Creole of rooted family, which enabled access to the positions of mayor and alderman in the cabildo, as well as the right to property and to receive land grants. However, Binayán
Carmona clarifies that the wife of the founder of the family belonged to a family background with no connection to the founding families of the city, since she came from a Madrid couple settled in Buenos Aires only in 1683, although their children did marry members of Creole families of old roots. As a pulper, that is, owner of large general branch shops, as those shops were called in the Hispanic era, Juan Esteban de Anchorena made his first contacts with the great lords who would help him in his growth in these lands and the ascent in the political framework within the Creole society. He repeatedly got some of them out of some financial trouble, often caused by gambling debts, to which the gentlemen were so fond; on many occasions, due to the impossibility of paying in cash, these loans were paid with lands of little value for the patricians but very desired by the shelves to achieve the status of landowners, which came to form the Anchorena ones with the fruit of their labor on these lands. Information file and passenger license to India of the merchant Domingo de Ybarra. He refers for my assistance handling of papers, and many dependencies that I take to my Cuydado, I need two Servants, and for such I propose, to [...] Juan Estevan of Anchorena natural of the City of Pamplona of ten and six years of age, medium of Body, thirtysomething Odious of smallpox, and a sign of Zicatriz on the forehead, single and natural of the Kingdoms of Spain, and not of those forbidden to pass to Indies. This initial pulpería soon turned into trade stores, which added more trade spaces, which led him to invest and prospered so much that already in 1775 he paid duties for the internation of goods in Tucumán, and had a network of correspondents in various cities from the interior to Upper Peru. In 1779, Anchorena bought his first property, a house at Cuartel 3, Manzana 42. From a retail merchant he went to a wholesaler, as a distribution chain complementing his commercial activities with loans and helping other smaller - scale merchants grow. His new economic category leads him to occupy positions of social and political importance in the viceregal era of that time. Of the ten families of the landowning bourgeoisie that in 1836 headed the list of owners of the largest number of hectares in the Province of Buenos Aires, only Álzaga, Anchorena, Pereyra and Girado remain on a similar list of the twelve largest almost a century later.
Awards: Sash and star of the Royal and Military Order of Saint Ferdinand (Real y Militar Orden de San Fernando), stars of the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Valencia (Royal Cavalry Armory of Valencia) and the Laureate Cross of Saint Ferdinand (Cruz Laureada de San Fernando).
