Villa General Belgrano

Villa General Belgrano in Córdoba Province was founded in 1932 by German and Austrian immigrants, and the cuckoo clocks in the shop windows, the schnitzel on the menus, and the Oktoberfest that takes place every October in the main street are all the authentic product of a community that brought its culture with them and has maintained it across three generations. The Calamuchita Valley setting — a bowl of green hills in the Sierras Grandes at 900 metres — provides the backdrop that made the settlers feel they had found a piece of Bavaria in Argentina. The town takes the comparison seriously and the Oktoberfest draws over 300,000 visitors each year.

Villa General Belgrano was established by settlers from Germany and Austria who arrived in Argentina in the early twentieth century, with a significant influx following World War I. The German cultural identity of the town — the architecture, the food, the language still spoken by older residents — is not a tourist performance but a community inheritance, and the town's Germanic institutions (a German school, a Catholic church founded by German missionaries, and civic associations) have maintained it across generations. The town became associated with the German naval presence in South America when survivors of the Graf Spee, sunk in Montevideo harbour in 1939, were interned in the region and many settled permanently in Villa General Belgrano after the war. The annual Oktoberfest, running since 1963, is the largest beer festival in Latin America outside Brazil.