One of the most remarkable travel books ever written is undoubtedly "Travels through Europe, Africa and North America -1845/1847 " by the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. At the moment of departing for Europe, Algiers and North America, the 34 years old Sarmiento had already written his famous "Facundo", had suffered twice the exile due to political reasons, and possessed a cultural background unique in the southern republics just recently released from the Hispanic colonial regime. His Chilean friend, Manuel Montt -then minister and later on President of Chile- had asked Sarmiento to review the education systems in the main countries and, in Sarmiento's own words, "analyze the institutions that delay or advance their progress". "Travels" conveys Sarmiento's impressions on all the matters that concerned him at the time. Slavery, religion, the difficult English-American relations, the Mexican war, the Spanish decay and its influence on Latin America, the different political and social evolution on the two sides of the Andes -Chile and Argentina- Rosas, San Martin and Washington, as well as the early technological progress in North America that such admiration and envy aroused in him. Sarmiento, throughout his 1847 trip, and later on as Argentine Ambassador to Washington, constitutes the first Argentine that had the chance of knowing, admiring and wide spreading the huge advances of the United States. The adoption of his educational methods, based on his observations in the US, constituted the mainstay of the progress of the Argentine Republic as inspired by the so-called "80's Generation".