It's impossible to stay for even a short time in Argentina without coming across the name of the national hero, José de San Martín  - he's as ubiquitous as Washington in the United States or de Gaulle in France, and has countless streets, plazas, public buildings and even a mountain named after him, as well as innumerable statues in his honour. He's often simply referred to as The Liberator ( El Libertador ) and, appropriately given his surname, is treated with saint-like reverence. It's ironic, therefore, that he didn't even take part in the country's initial liberation from the Spanish Crown, that he actually helped to free Chile, Argentina's traditional rival, and that he spent the last 23 years of his life in self-imposed exile in France. Even this last fact is celebrated across the country by naming streets and whole barrios after Boulogne-sur-Mer, the French town where he died in 1850. A slightly larger-than-original replica of his Parisian mansion, Grand Bourg, built on the edge of leafy Palermo Chico, is now the Instituto Sanmartiniano, a library-cum-study-centre given over to research into the great man.

San Martín was born into a humble family - he was the son of a junior officer - in 1778 in the former Jesuit mission settlement of Yapeyú, Corrientes Province, where you can now visit his birthplace and a commemorative museum. He was packed off to the academy in Buenos Aires and then to military school in Spain, and later served in the royal army, taking part in the Spanish victories against the Napoleonic invasions in 1808-11. When he heard the news of Argentina's unilateral declaration of independence, he returned to his homeland, and assisted in training the rag-bag army that was trying to resist Spain's attempt to cling onto its South American empire. After having replaced Manuel Belgrano as leader of the independence forces in 1813, he became increasingly active in politics, as a pragmatic conservative, and attended the Tucumán Congress in 1816, at which a new state was officially declared. He then formed his own army, known popularly as the Ejército de los Andes , basing himself in Mendoza, where he was governor for several years, and in San Juan. From there he crossed the Andes and obliterated royalist troops at Chacabuco, thereby freeing Chile from the imperialistic yoke - though his friend and comrade-at-arms Bernardo O'Higgins got most of the credit - finally mopping up the remaining royalist resistence at Maipú in 1818, before moving on to Lima, Peru.

San Martín was not in the slightest bit interested in personal political power, but was in favour of setting up a constitutional monarchy in the newly emerging South American states. In 1821 he signed the so-called Punchanca agreement with the Viceroy of Peru to put a member of the Spanish royal family on the Peruvian throne, but the royalists did not respond and, ultimately, he unilaterally declared Peru's independence on July 12, 1821. Unable to hold the country together in the face of royalist resistance, he called upon Simón Bolívar , the liberator of Venezuela, to come to his assistance. The only meeting between the two giants of South American independence occurred in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1822. Bolívar's radical republican ideals clashed with San Martín's conservative mindset, so it seemed predestined that no compromise position would be found, and, though no one knows what exactly was said in this tantalizing encounter, San Martín opted to withdraw from Peru. Frustrated by an emerging Argentina that was neither the new-style kingdom he yearned for nor the democratic modern nation-state Bolívar had advocated but, instead, a patchwork of disunited provinces led by brutish caudillos every bit as power-hungry as the viceroys and governors they had replaced, San Martín took off to France . He was never to return to Argentina during his lifetime, and, in his self-imposed exile, he slipped into obscurity; all this changed after his death, however, and the national hero's bodily remains were repatriated later that century. He now lies buried in Buenos Aires' Metropolitan Cathedral, where his tomb is a national monument - a shrine to the "Grandfather of the Nation".