Cuyo (Central Andes) Culture & Language

Cuyo’s culture is organised around wine, water and the mountains.

The Vendimia

Argentina’s largest harvest festival and one of the biggest wine events anywhere. It runs for about a week at the start of March, with blessings of the fruit, a queen chosen from candidates representing each department, a long parade of floats, and a closing spectacle in a hillside amphitheatre with thousands of performers, fireworks and a ceremonial crushing of grapes. It is genuinely popular rather than a trade event, and Mendoza fills.

The acequias

The open irrigation channels beside every street are a civic institution with their own administration going back centuries, and the plane trees they water are what makes the city liveable in a desert summer.

Mountaineering

Aconcagua draws climbers from everywhere, and Mendoza has a serious guiding and outfitting culture around it.

Italian inheritance

In the food — pasta, olive oil, cured meats — in the family winery structure, and in the names on the bottles.

The Difunta Correa

A folk saint venerated across Cuyo and beyond, said to have died of thirst in the desert following her conscripted husband, her infant found alive still feeding at her breast. Drivers leave bottles of water at roadside shrines to her, and the main sanctuary in San Juan Province draws hundreds of thousands at Easter. The Catholic church does not recognise her; the devotion is undiminished, and the piles of water bottles beside the highways are unmistakable.

Tonada

The regional song form, slower and more melancholy than the northwest’s zamba, sung with guitar.

Spanish is the language, in the Argentine variety with vos and the sh pronunciation of ll and y. The Cuyo accent is softer and slower than the Buenos Aires one and closer to Chilean in some features.

English is widely spoken in the wine industry, where tastings are routinely given in it, and at the Aconcagua outfitters. Elsewhere it is limited.

A good deal of Italian vocabulary has entered the local speech through immigration, as it has across Argentina.

Useful: hola, gracias, por favor, cuanto sale for how much, la cuenta for the bill, and dale, which means almost anything affirmative.

Wine vocabulary is worth a little effort: bodega for winery, finca for estate, cata for tasting, cosecha for vintage.