  This is 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 system --with a fiber bundle formulation-- in more than three
dimensions, which could provide a firm ground for constructing a quantum theory
of the gravitational field. The starting point is a gravitational action which
generalizes the Einstein theory for dimensions D>4 --Lovelock gravity. It is
then shown that in odd dimensions there is a particular choice of the arbitrary
parameters of the action that makes the theory gauge invariant under the
(anti-)de Sitter or the Poincare groups. The resulting lagrangian is a
Chern-Simons form for a connection of the corresponding gauge groups and the
vielbein and the spin connection are parts of this connection field. These
theories also admit a natural supersymmetric extension for all odd D where the
local supersymmetry algebra closes off-shell and without a need for auxiliary
fields. No analogous construction is available in even dimensions. A cursory
discussion of the unexpected dynamical features of these theories and a number
of open problems are also presented.
