Cuyo (Central Andes)
Discover Cuyo (Central Andes)
Introduction
Cuyo is the central Andean part of Argentina, a dry, sunny, irrigated region pressed up against the highest mountains in the Americas. It gets almost no rain — everything here grows on snowmelt carried down from the cordillera in channels built originally by the Huarpe and extended ever since.
That water makes it Argentina’s wine country. Mendoza province alone produces the large majority of the national output, with malbec — a Bordeaux grape that never did well in France and does extraordinarily well here — grown on gravel terraces between nine hundred and one thousand five hundred metres in the Uco Valley and Luján de Cuyo. The combination of altitude, sunlight and cold nights is the whole explanation, and the bodegas are set up for visitors.
Above the vineyards, Aconcagua rises to 6,961 metres, the highest peak outside Asia, reached by a road that runs up to the Chilean border past the natural rock bridge at Puente del Inca. Further north, San Juan Province holds the Ischigualasto and Talampaya parks, a pair of desert basins whose rock records the entire Triassic period and where some of the earliest dinosaurs were found; both are UNESCO-listed. Summers are hot, winters mild, and the harvest festival in Mendoza each March is the largest in the country.