  These lectures are intended as a broad introduction to Chern Simons gravity
and supergravity. The motivation for these theories lies in the desire to have
a gauge invariant action -in the sense of fiber bundles- in more than three
dimensions, which could provide a firm ground for constructing a quantum theory
of the gravitational field. The case of Chern-Simons gravity and its
supersymmetric extension for all odd D is presented. No analogous construction
is available in even dimensions.
