Entre Ríos graveyard
Actualitzat: Nov 1
If any single experience has driven me to start this blog no doubt it has been my visit to Entre Rios desarmadero (scrapyard). Like any other old car enthusiast I have visited a multitude of museums, fairs, and concentrations, accumulated hundreds of magazines and books or spent hours and hours surfing the internet with the most varied purposes related to the automobile, but nothing had seemed to me before so attractive that it was worth it to be explained in a blog.
If I lived in a country where there are still car graveyards like those that were abundant in Europe in the 1980s, I probably wouldn’t be as impressed to see a place where you can still find the remains of cars that are nearly a hundred years old.
It was my last weekend in Buenos Aires, a city where it is difficult to get bored. Here every day you can still see on the streets cars that are already classics in Europe. On Friday night I discovered on the Internet the pictures of a car’s cemetery full of classics from the 20s to the 80s. Since I found out that it was within a reasonable distance, I rented a Clio on the Internet and, early in the morning, I left for Entre Ríos.
As it was Saturday traffic was fluid, but it was hard for me not to imagine what it would be like to leave Buenos Aires on a workday, with the nine lanes in each direction full of cars and the smoke from the buses packed with locals. Fortunately, I was able to leave the city without any major problems. The landscape was nothing special until I got to Zárate and crossed the first bridge over the Paraná. Watching the river from the bridge makes you feel small and prepares you for a wonderful trip between wetlands, rivers and pastures where it is impossible not to stop continuously to enjoy the landscape and the numerous birds you come across.
Google Maps is sometimes so futuristic that it takes you on roads not yet been built. That's how I ended up on a track where I thought I would end up spending the night. Someone I asked told me that I was lucky, that day it was possible to cross. A few weeks earlier the water level was seven meters above road level. I thought it was an exaggeration, but the cows’ bloated corpses I found along the way confirmed that the area was flood-prone. Fortunately, the Clio passed the test, and I reached my destination. At the side of the road I could see that “desarmadero”, which is how they call car scrapyards in Argentina.
Maybe it was in the 90's last time I saw in Spain a scrapyard displaying such old cars. In the first row, lined up in front of the road, there were everything from Ford A's to Falcons from the first series. I had never seen, except in photos, trees growing through the remains of cars. In that first row there was a Ford A with a tree growing inside it could be about three metres tall. There were no modern cars in that place, the most recent ones were Peugeot 504 and Renault 12, which continued to be produced in Argentina for decades after being discontinued in Europe.
Closer to the road, there were many American models: Ford, Chevrolet, Studebaker, De Soto, Pontiac, etc. One of the things that impressed me the most was seeing how there were cars that were still standing on their wooden spoked rims after having been left outdoors for decades and decades. The junkyard is a review of Argentine history of the last century, where the great American cars from the times of economic prosperity at the beginning of the century coexisted with the "made in Argentina" small European utility vehicles from the 60s and 70s.
Seeing a Model T Ford that has surely been rusting for more than seventy years in the same place and dreaming of seing it restored and brought back to life is a great experience. No doubt it looks more attractive to me than seeing the same car perfectly restored in a museum. Sure, when I return to Argentina I will look for the opportunity to visit another place like that.
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