Galileo Galilei Planetarium

From Avenida Sarmiento it looks like a spaceship that has touched down in the park, with a lake at its feet. This is the Galileo Galilei Planetarium, the city’s own, and its dome has been projecting the sky for almost sixty years. What few people know is that its garden holds half of a rock that fell from space, and that the other half is in Washington.

A space-race building

Construction began in 1962, designed and supervised by Enrique Jan, an architect with what was then the Municipalidad, the city government. Mayor Eugenio Schettini opened it on December 20, 1966, but the stars took a little longer: the first show was on June 13, 1967, for students from two schools, and the general public didn’t get in until April 1968. That’s why you’ll read 1966 or 1967 depending on who’s telling the story, and both dates are right.

Jan conceived it as an ideogram: a building meant to be read like a sign, inspired by East Asian scripts. Everything grows out of a single module, the equilateral triangle, and from it come the hexagons and the circles: you’ll hardly find a right angle anywhere. The ringed dome evokes Saturn floating over the water of a crater. These were the years of the space race, and it shows.

The main hall is a half-sphere 20 meters across, with 360 reclining seats. In 2017, for its fiftieth anniversary, it was restored true to the original: the wood, stone and ceramics were brought back, and only the glass was replaced.

From a German projector to a digital sky

Its original heart was a German Zeiss projector, a mechanical one about five meters tall and weighing two and a half tons. It had more than a hundred individual projectors: for the Sun, the Moon, the planets visible to the naked eye and some 8,900 stars. It was set running by Antonio Cornejo, who gave the first show, taught children to find their bearings by the Southern Cross, and ran the Planetarium for more than thirty years.

The Zeiss worked until 2011, when it was replaced by a Japanese projector. Today six digital projectors cover the dome. And inside are fragments of moon rock brought back by Apollo 11, a gift from the United States government.

Stones from the sky in the garden

Outside are iron meteorites from Campo del Cielo, the “Field of the Sky”: an area between the provinces of Chaco and Santiago del Estero, in northern Argentina, where some four thousand years ago a mass of iron broke apart as it entered the atmosphere and scattered fragments across the ground. One of the Planetarium’s is called La Perdida, “the lost one,” and it turned up in 1965.

Before the dome, a playing field

These grounds once belonged to the Buenos Aires Cricket Club. Here, on June 20, 1867, the first recorded soccer match in Argentina was played. It was organized by the Buenos Aires Football Club, newly founded by the brothers Thomas and James Hogg. It was supposed to be played in May near La Boca, but bad weather moved it to Palermo. It was eight against eight, and to tell the teams apart one side wore red caps and the other white. The match lasted about two hours and ended 4–0. A monolith near the Planetarium commemorates the day.

A capsule for 2210

The Planetarium keeps something none of us will ever see opened: the Bicentennial Time Capsule. It’s a titanium cylinder sealed in 2013 with contributions from more than 80,000 people, DNA samples from twelve volunteers and seeds from the city’s trees. It will be opened on May 25, 2210, when the May Revolution, the 1810 uprising that began Argentina’s break with Spain, turns four hundred.

What to look for

Planning your visit

• Allow an hour for the building, the garden and the museum, plus the length of the show if you go into the dome.
• Shows have limited seating and times change. Check them on the City’s tourism website, which links to the Planetarium’s own site.
• The Bosques de Palermo get busy by day and on weekends. If you stay to see the dome lit up, stick to areas that are well lit and have people around.
• The Rose Garden and the Japanese Garden are a few blocks away, and MALBA, the Latin American art museum, about ten.

Last checked October 2026.