Somewhere in the pampas, between fields of wheat, maize and soy, thousands of treetops form the winding silhouette of a guitar, which is visible only from the sky.
The unusual site – if you can high up enough to really see it – a farmer’s tribute to his late wife, who loved both the instrument and nature.
The peculiar 'Estancia La Guitarra de Árboles' is located in General Levalle in the south of Córdoba Province.
The protagonists of this love story are both dead but their four children administer the place today, preserving the guitar of trees – their mother’s dream.
Before her sudden death from an aneurism in 1977 at the age of 25, Graciela Yraizoz told her husband Pedro Ureta about her project for the estancia, a yearning she could sadly not bring to fruition.
When Graciela died, she was pregnant with the couple’s fifth child, who died with her.
In their memory, Ureta patiently planted some 7,000 trees in a space of 25 hectares – an epic masterpiece which took him five years and was contemplated as an eternal tribute.
No professional landscape designer would accept the project, so he did it with his own hands, together with his children.
It was tough work. After several lost harvests, the guitar eventually began to take shape. Almost half a century after Yraizoz’s death, the trees finally reached full maturity, giving the silhouette its maximum splendour.
The guitar of trees, some 1.1 kilometres long, combine evergreen Californian cypresses with blue eucalyptus to trace the six strings up to the bridge, drawn with pine cypresses.
The silhouette ends at a rural path inviting a tour of this green monument, although the image of the guitar can only truly be seen from the sky.
Ureta died in 2019 at the age of 79 – since he was afraid of flying, he never flew over his masterpiece.
"After rainy days the colours are more intense and come to life. It can then be appreciated that while all cypresses are green, none is the same colour as the other, showing every shade of green," the couple’s son Ignacio Ureta wrote on a blog about the artistic creation.
NASA has photographed the silhouette, which can be seen in Google Earth via the following coordinates: 33°52'04.3" S 63°59'16.9" W.
– TIMES/AFP
Comments