Tilcara

Tilcara in Jujuy Province rises in tiers from the Quebrada de Humahuaca floor to a ridgeline of cactus and clay, its streets too steep for anything but foot traffic and its Pucará fortress visible from every corner of town. The pre-Inca citadel — rebuilt in 1908 after decades of archaeological study — sits on a hill above the quebrada with sightlines over 20 kilometres of coloured canyon in both directions, exactly as its builders intended. The annual Carnival here runs for four days in February and dissolves the distinction between street and dance floor entirely.

Tilcara is the cultural and commercial centre of the Quebrada de Humahuaca, a UNESCO World Heritage Site recognised in 2003 for its 10,000-year record of human habitation along the Andean trade route between the Bolivian altiplano and the Argentine lowlands. The Pucará de Tilcara was occupied by successive cultures from approximately 900 AD until Spanish arrival in the sixteenth century, and its excavation — begun in 1908 by the University of Buenos Aires — produced one of Argentina's most significant archaeological collections, now housed in the adjacent Eduardo Casanova Museum. The town's contemporary art scene, established by Argentine modernist Jorge Bermúdez in the 1920s, has attracted painters and sculptors ever since and gives Tilcara's handful of galleries a weight unusual for a village of 5,000 people. The carnival, centred on the pre-Andean tradition of the compadres and comadres, is one of the most visceral in northwest Argentina.