Andean Northwest Culture & Language

Northwestern culture is Andean, and it is the strand of Argentina that connects to Bolivia and Peru rather than to Europe.

Carnival in the Quebrada

Unlike anywhere else in Argentina. The festival begins when a small devil figure is dug up from a mound on the hillside, releasing licence for nine days of dancing, drinking, flour-throwing and copleros singing improvised verses to a hand drum. At the end the devil is buried again, along with everyone’s excesses, until the following year. It is pre-Christian in structure, overlaid on the Catholic calendar, and it is taken entirely seriously.

Pachamama

On 1 August, households and communities dig a hole, feed it with food, drink, coca and cigarettes, and ask the earth’s permission for the year. The first sip of any drink goes to the ground throughout the year.

Music

The charango, a small ten-stringed instrument traditionally with an armadillo-shell body, along with quena flutes and panpipes. The zamba, danced with handkerchiefs, is the northwest’s dance, and Mercedes Sosa — from Tucuman — carried the region’s music worldwide.

Weaving and ceramics

Llama and sheep wool woven on backstrap and pedal looms, and a ceramic tradition continuous from pre-Hispanic forms.

The Llullaillaco children

The three Inca children found at 6,739 metres in 1999 are displayed, one at a time and on rotation, at the museum in Salta. They were chosen for capacocha, walked hundreds of kilometres to the summit and left there, and the cold and altitude preserved them so completely that they appear asleep. Whether they should be displayed at all is argued about locally, and the museum presents that argument alongside them.

Cactus wood

The churches of the Quebrada are roofed and doored in cardon cactus timber, the only wood available.

Spanish is the language, and the northwestern accent is notably slower and softer than the Buenos Aires one, without the sharp Italian intonation of the capital.

Quechua and Aymara vocabulary runs through the local Spanish, and Quechua is still spoken by some communities in the Santiagueno lowlands and near the Bolivian border. Place names throughout are Andean in origin.

English is spoken in Salta’s tourism businesses and in Cafayate’s wineries, and very little in the Quebrada villages or on the puna.

Useful Spanish: hola, gracias, por favor, cuanto sale. Argentines use vos rather than tu, with its own verb forms.

Pachamama and apacheta — the stone cairns at mountain passes, to which travellers add a stone — are worth knowing as words and as customs.