Lucila Bombal Foundation
The Foundation
The Lucila Bombal Foundation was created to recover and project Lucila’s figure as the vital inspiration of the Ancón project. Her deep bond with the Estancia, her cultural sensitivity, and her way of inhabiting the place—attentive, curious, and profoundly human—shaped a vision that integrates territory, people, and time.
That spirit now takes form as a living institution, where family history ceases to be memory and becomes action.
The Foundation understands legacy as a cultural and social engine, oriented toward continuity and committed to the present. Ancón is not preserved as a closed museum, but as a house open to knowledge, dialogue, and transformation.
Education and Training
The Foundation promotes educational programs, workshops, and encounters focused on learning and the development of the local and regional community. Knowledge circulates openly, accessibly, and in context, in constant dialogue with the territory and its productive, cultural, and social realities.
Educational initiatives are built through institutional partnerships and the exchange between academic knowledge, practical experience, and local wisdom. To educate at Ancón is to accompany processes, strengthen capacities, and sow the future with a sustainable, long-term perspective.
Culture and Art
Art and culture operate as languages of encounter and reflection. Exhibitions, curatorial projects, residencies, and cultural activities activate dialogue between the Estancia’s historical heritage and contemporary expressions.
Culture is lived as a form of hospitality: welcoming ideas, perspectives, and questions; opening spaces for thought; and enabling crossings between disciplines, generations, and sensibilities. At the Foundation, art is not ornament—it is a tool for understanding time, place, and the human experience.
Research and Territory
The Foundation develops research projects linked to landscape, productive history, cultural heritage, and the sustainability of the Uco Valley. This work brings together academic research, local knowledge, and direct observation of the territory.
The environment is understood as an active source of knowledge. Mountain, vineyard, Estancia, and community form part of a single system of understanding in constant construction. Research here is a way of caring for and projecting the territory.
Community and Encounter
Above all, the Foundation is a space for dialogue. Talks, open activities, reflection forums, and partnerships with public and private institutions strengthen bonds between people, generations, and local stakeholders.
Community is built through listening, presence, and shared work. Ancón offers a place to meet, think together, and generate real impact—sustaining a living network that connects past, present, and future.
Legacy and Heritage
Lucy’s story is synonymous with culture, hospitality, and charisma. An exquisite hostess, she imbued every corner of Château d’Ancón with her spirit, understanding the house not merely as a space, but as a way of welcoming, sharing, and inhabiting time.
A woman of broad culture and singular sensitivity, she was passionate about livestock, harvests, and rural life. Her influential personality and forward-looking vision were expressed both in daily management and in a deep attentiveness to the human and social environment.
That commitment had strong family roots. Her father, Domingo Lucas Bombal, was an innovator and exemplary administrator, a pioneer in planting vineyards at 1,400 meters above sea level. In the previous generation, Doña Lucila Barrionuevo Pescara de Bombal carried out an intense entrepreneurial, educational, charitable, and religious activity, driving key donations for the region’s institutional development.
The Pescara Bombal family donated land and supported foundational works for Mendoza and Tupungato—Don Bosco, Murialdo, María Auxiliadora, the Murialdo church, Juan Agustín Maza University, and numerous schools—and actively supported the creation of Latin America’s first Faculty of Oenology in 1965, linked to the country’s oldest wine cellar, owned by the family.
This trajectory was recognized in 1925 by the Holy See, which awarded Lucila Bombal a gold medal, a diploma, and an honorary title conferred by Pope Pius XI. Lucy grew up in this environment, learning from an early age the value of family work, generosity, and collective construction as the foundation of economic, social, and human progress.
That legacy remains alive at Ancón: a way of being, of welcoming, and of caring that transforms history into everyday presence.
