Purmamarca

Purmamarca sits in a bowl walled on three sides by layered mineral colour — ochre, orange, violet, yellow and green stacked in bands laid down over hundreds of millions of years, rising close enough to shape every lane and courtyard. A single church, Santa Rosa de Lima of 1648, anchors the adobe plaza where artisans lay out weavings at first light. The Cerro de los Siete Colores looms directly above — and it is, very conservatively, at least seven.

At 2,324 metres inside the UNESCO-listed Quebrada de Humahuaca, the village stands on one of the pre-cordillera's most complete geological records: Precambrian to Cretaceous formations weathering at different rates, iron oxides, copper, manganese and carbonates doing what looks like paintwork. Spanish missionaries founded the settlement in the seventeenth century around an existing Omaguaca community, and the plaza still traces the colonial grid. The Paseo de los Colorados, a three-kilometre signed circuit around the base of the coloured hills, is the way to read the geology at close range — walked slowly, for the altitude and the intense sun, not for a promised light effect. The craft market fills the square with weavings and ceramics, and the whole visit works on foot.