The ESMA Museum and Site of Memory operates in what used to be ESMA’s Officers’ Club, a 5,390 sq. m building inaugurated in 1948 to be a leisure and rest area for high-ranking Navy officers. The construction has an independent pavilion, three floors in comb design, basements, and a large attic.

The ESMA was an emblematic Clandestine Center in South America. Due to its size, its location in an urban center, the co-existence of naval officers and the detained-disappeared, and its unique concentration features of imprisonment and extermination, its role transcended its own borders and transformed it into a heritage of outstanding universal value.

Since the years of the dictatorship, the Officers’ Club has been the object of many interventions and threats that meant to erase the remaining traces of its former role as a clandestine center. Most of these changes occurred in 1979 in order to hide the clandestine center from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which visited Argentina and ESMA due to the accusations made by survivors and families of the victims. Some of the biggest transformations were the demolition of the elevator and the stairs that led down to the basement, as well as the addition of galleries in the North and South courtyards.

The Navy, which held the building until 2004, handed the place over to the Argentine State completely empty and totally deteriorated. Despite this, the marks and traces of its existence as a Clandestine Center of Detention, Torture and Extermination (CCDTyE) are still there and they have been preserved.