Cuyo (Central Andes) Events

Cuyo’s calendar has one event that dominates everything else, and it is about wine.

Fiesta Nacional de la Vendimia — late February and early March

The National Grape Harvest Festival is the largest wine festival in the Americas and among the largest anywhere, held in Mendoza since 1936. It builds over weeks: each of the province’s eighteen departments holds its own harvest celebration and chooses a representative, there is a blessing of the fruit in the vineyards, and the city fills. The main weekend brings the Via Blanca, a night parade of illuminated floats through the streets, a daytime Carrousel with horses and folk groups, and then the Acto Central in the Frank Romero Day amphitheatre on a hillside above the city — a staged spectacle with upwards of a thousand dancers and performers, fireworks over the whole hill, and the crowning of the national harvest queen. Tens of thousands attend and the surrounding week is a continuous street party. Book accommodation months ahead.

Aconcagua season — mid-November to mid-March

The only window in which the mountain is climbed. Permits are bought online in advance and prices vary sharply by date.

Difunta Correa pilgrimage — Holy Week and through the year

The sanctuary at Vallecito in San Juan Province receives several hundred thousand pilgrims at Easter and a steady stream the rest of the year, many arriving on foot or by lorry. The site is covered in offerings — bottles of water above all, along with car number plates, wedding dresses, scale models of houses and football shirts — left in thanks for a request granted. It is folk Catholicism entirely outside the official church, and it is one of the largest popular devotions in Argentina.

Sun festival and regional fiestas — February and March

San Juan Province holds its own Fiesta Nacional del Sol, and the smaller wine towns each keep their harvest observances.