Quilmes Ruins

The ruins of the Quilmes people's hillside city in Tucumán Province stretch up the slope of the Sierra de Quilmes at 1,850 metres, the stone foundations of a settlement that held 3,000 people at its peak and was still inhabited when the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century. The Quilmes resisted Spanish conquest for 130 years — longer than any other indigenous community in the Calchaquí Valleys — before the Spanish resorted in 1665 to force-marching the survivors 1,400 kilometres to Buenos Aires, where most died within years. The city they left has been partially reconstructed and sits in a landscape of cardon cacti and red hillside that has not changed since the day they left.

Quilmes (properly the Ruinas de Quilmes or Ciudad Sagrada de los Quilmes) was the principal settlement of the Quilmes culture, a pre-Inca and then Inca-period people of the Diaguita-Calchaquí linguistic group who occupied the Calchaquí Valleys from approximately 800 AD. The site at 1,850 metres on the Sierra de Quilmes covers 30 hectares and at its peak housed 3,000-5,000 people in a city of stone compounds, terraced agriculture, and a central ceremonial sector. The Quilmes resistance to Spanish colonisation, lasting from 1535 to 1665, is one of the longest documented indigenous resistances in South American colonial history. The surviving Quilmes population was force-marched to Buenos Aires in 1667 and established in a reduction at what is now the Buenos Aires suburb of Quilmes — the origin of the name used by Argentina's most famous beer brand. Archaeological management of the site has been controversial, with a reconstruction project in the 1970s criticised for using non-traditional materials.