The Travelers’ Hotel of Río Gallegos is the guesthouse where, in early October 1966, the Argentine State lodged the repatriates of the Operativo Cóndor under watch while their repatriation was processed. It is the administrative antechamber of the descent: lobbies, letters, offices, forms.
| Type | Place (guesthouse) |
| Location | Río Gallegos, Patagonia, Argentina |
| Houses of the Cycle | ☷ House of the Descent · ⌖ House of History |
| Spanish entry | Hotel de viajantes, Río Gallegos |
Description
Hotel de viajantes is the period term for guesthouses that lodged traveling salesmen and passing strangers. It has beds, a passenger register and a reception desk: a place of passage and a polite cage, where papers produce the waiting and those who log arrivals and departures sustain it. The surveillance aims to be discreet and never fully is. It offers food, bed and custody.
Setting
Río Gallegos surrounds the hotel with a geography of oil and salt:
- the State oil field, YPF, the economic pulse of the region;
- the Loyola air base, a military presence on a frontier;
- the salt river that names the city and flows down to the South Atlantic, where the batrachian brotherhood hides.
Río Gallegos, YPF and the Loyola base are real places of the far south of Argentina, kept as they are.
Role
The repatriates of Operativo Cóndor, who flew to the islands to plant flags on the peat, came back marked by what they found beneath it, after the blue stone and what beats under the islands. Caught in the same procedure are Dardo Cabo and his people.
The Esoteric Order of Dagon has agents able to operate inland, far from the sea. A guesthouse with a register and a flow of strangers is the kind of place where an agent of the deep can pass unnoticed among travelers.