Casabindo

Casabindo holds the Fiesta de la Virgen de la Asunción every 15th of August — the only toreo de la vincha in Argentina, a ceremony in which a bull enters the plaza not to be fought but to have a ribboned headband taken from its horns by young men dodging on foot, and the animal leaves unharmed. The eighteenth-century church facing the plaza is called the cathedral of the Puna, and the village around both counts fewer than fifty permanent residents at 3,400 metres.

Casabindo was once the administrative heart of a colonial district spanning the high plateau, and its church keeps the wealth of that era: an exceptional collection of Cuzqueño school paintings — European iconography worked through Andean hands — one of the most elaborate gilded altarpieces in the Argentine north, and a colonial canvas of the Virgin in military dress that has few peers anywhere. The toreo itself may predate the Spanish, absorbed into the Catholic calendar rather than replaced by it; on the feast day thousands arrive from across Jujuy and Bolivia, and for the other 364 the village returns to puna silence, flamingo lagoons, salt flats and vicuña herds reached by dirt road. Both versions are true, and both are the destination.