Argentina
Chilecito
A 35-kilometre aerial tramway to a gold mine at 4,500 metres, abandoned intact since the 1920s.
Chilecito in La Rioja Province sits in the Famatina Valley at 1,074 metres, surrounded by the highest non-volcanic peaks in the western hemisphere and connected to a former goldmine 22 kilometres up the mountain by one of the most extraordinary engineering projects of early-twentieth-century South America — a cable car system built by the Germans in 1904 that carried ore down from 4,600 metres and is now rusting in silence at each of its nine stations above the town. The wine being produced in the surrounding valley is discovering an international audience thirty years later than Mendoza, which is why it still sells at 1990 prices.
Chilecito is the second-largest city in La Rioja Province and the commercial centre of the Famatina Valley, surrounded by the Famatina system — peaks exceeding 6,000 metres that represent the highest point in the world at this latitude (29°S) outside the Himalaya and Karakoram. The Guanchín cable car (La Mejicana), built 1903-1904 by the Compañía Minera de Chilecito, ran 22 kilometres from the town at 1,074 metres to the La Mejicana mine at 4,619 metres and is now preserved as a national monument, with most of its nine stations intact and accessible to hikers and 4WD vehicles. The surrounding valley produces Torrontés, Bonarda, and Cabernet Sauvignon at elevations between 900 and 1,200 metres, and the Cooperativa La Riojana — founded in 1940 — is the largest Argentine wine cooperative by volume. The Cuesta de Miranda, 35 kilometres north, is among the most dramatic mountain roads in the country.
Solo
The Guanchín cable car stations above Chilecito — rusting iron towers at each of nine altitude steps up to 4,600 metres, connected by a dirt road that most vehicles cannot navigate above station six — reward the solo traveller who arrives with a full day and an interest in what industrial ambition looks like a century after the ambition ran out.
Couple
Chilecito as a two-day La Rioja exploration — the Cuesta de Miranda in the morning, the valley bodegas in the afternoon, the cable car ruins above the town on the second day — covers a landscape and a food culture that most Argentine travellers have never encountered. The wine prices are still what the rest of the country charged in the 1990s.
- The La Mejicana tramway operated 1903–1929, carrying ore from a gold mine at 4,600m — cabins, cables, and eight stations survive intact.
- The mine extracted 12 tonnes of gold in its 26-year lifespan — the shafts remain open and explorable.
- Four of the eight original stations are accessible on foot from the town side — no 4WD required.
- Famatina valley Torrontés and Malbec are served at town restaurants that close between 2pm and 8pm — siesta is observed.
Patero wine — foot-trodden in the traditional way — from the bodegas lining the main road.
Empanadas riojanas and olives from local groves in this sun-baked foothill town.
Pedra de Lume
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Vale do Paúl
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Monastery of St. Anthony
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Rice terraces so vertiginous they look like topographical maps carved directly into the sky.
Casabindo
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Argentina's only bull ceremony strips ribbons from horns at 3,400 metres each August.
Parque Nacional Los Alerces
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Alerce trees 2,600 years old standing in forest unchanged since the last ice age.
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A moonscape where 230-million-year-old dinosaur bones scatter across wind-eroded clay mushrooms and stone cannonballs.
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Caiman drift among giant lily pads in a freshwater marsh where time itself pools and stills.