Peñas in Salta
Salta is famed for its lively peñas, informal folk-music clubs mainly found in the Northwest. Most open around 8pm to serve food – mainly local fare such as locro and empanadas. The musicians turn up and start jamming later, often at around 10pm but in some cases not till midnight. Many peñas, particularly the more touristy ones, charge extra for the music/show.
Boliche de Balderrama
One of the most famous peñas; well known as a bohemian hangout – it was founded in 1954 by the late Juan Balderrama and his brothers, and immortalized by a zamba written by Manuel Castilla – nowadays it’s a far more conventional place, attracting plenty of tourists. Shows can be good fun, but don’t expect a truly authentic experience, despite its historic pedigree.
La Casona del Molino
Empanadas, locro, tamales, humitas, sangría and improvised live music after 11pm, all in a handsomely restored Neocolonial mansion. Cash only (but no cover). Get here early to secure a table.
La Vieja Estación
Modern peña in one of the city’s trendiest streets, dishing out food, draught beer and folk music shows. Shows cost $200–300, but credit cards are accepted. Reservations recommended (taken from 7pm daily). Shows usually start around 10.15pm.
Plaza 9 de Julio
Salta’s central square, Plaza 9 de Julio, is one of the country’s most harmonious. Surrounded on all four sides by graceful, shady recovas, or arcades, under which several café terraces lend themselves to idle people-watching, it’s a great place to while away an hour or two. The well-manicured central part of the square is a collection of palms and jacarandas, fountains and benches, plus a quaint, late nineteenth-century bandstand and an equestrian statue of independence hero Juan Antonio de Arenales. Around it stand the city’s Neoclassical cathedral, the Teatro Provincial (the beautifully renovated Cine Victoria of 1940), the snow-white Cabildo and two of the city’s best museums.
Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña (MAAM)
The Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña (MAAM) is the one museum in Salta that you should not miss. It was specially created to house the so-called Llullaillaco Children, one of the most important archeological finds ever made in Argentina and generally regarded as the best preserved Inca mummies ever found. In 1999, three naturally mummified Inca children were uncovered by an expedition of mountaineers and scientists on top of Volcán Llullaillaco, due west of Salta on the Chilean border and 6739m above sea level. They are a 6-year-old girl (La niña del rayo), visibly struck by lightning some time after her burial, her hair arranged in two small braids and with a metal plaque as an adornment (which attracted the lightning); a teenage girl (La doncella) whose face was painted with a red pigment and who had small fragments of coca leaves above her upper lip; and a 7-year-old boy (El niño) wearing a white feather ornament tied around his head. Their incredibly well-preserved corpses – all three lived around 1490 AD – were at first kept in a university laboratory in the city while tests on their tissue and other remains were completed. They are now shown, one at a time, in a specially refrigerated case, and the effect is startling.
The jury is still out as to whether it is sacrilegious to display the bodies in a public museum: the decision to do so provoked a furore, including demonstrations by representatives of local indigenous groups, so bear in mind that this is a sensitive issue. The children were sacrificed to the Inca deities, possibly in a fertility ceremony or as an offering to the gods of the sun and moon. They were probably drugged unconscious with a concoction of coca leaves and maize beer or chicha (so their bodies were not rendered imperfect by wounds) and then buried, left to die of the lack of oxygen and the extreme cold (though the boy’s death was far from peaceful, as he was tied up and vomit and blood was found on his clothing).
Over a hundred artefacts, part of the remarkably intact treasure-trove buried with
the children at the end of the fifteenth century, are on display in the museum’s other rooms, where the temperature and humidity are kept artificially low – bring something warm to wear. The exhibit is both scientific and didactic, including a video about the expedition, displays of textiles and the like (the English labels are also very good). Check out also the exhibit on La Reina del Cerro (“Queen of the Hill”), the deteriorated remnants of another Inca mummy discovered on Cerro Chuscha in 1920 and illegally trafficked in subsequent years.
Earthquakes and the Fiesta del Milagro
No earthquake as destructive as those that flattened the cities of Mendoza in 1861 and San Juan in 1944 has struck the Northwest region of Argentina within recent history, but this part of the country lies along the same fault line that was responsible for that seismic activity and is prone to occasional tremors, some of them violent. The Nazca plate, beneath the eastern Pacific, and the South American plate, comprising the whole continent, are constantly colliding – a continuation of the tectonic activity that formed the Andean cordillera. To make matters worse, the Nazca plate is subducting – nudging its way beneath the landmass – an action that accounts for the abundance of volcanoes along the range; some of them are extinct, others lie dormant, but none in the Northwest is very active. Nonetheless, frequent earthquakes of varying strength (but mostly mild for geological reasons) rock Northwest Argentina, accounting for the repeated displacement of many settlements and the absence of colonial architecture in some.
Salta still thanks its lucky stars for El Milagro, the legend according to which two sacred images have spared the city the kind of destruction caused by seismic disasters. An image of Christ and another of the Virgin Mary were found floating in a box off the coast of Perú in 1592, exactly a century after the Americas were discovered by Columbus, and somehow ended up in Salta. Precisely one century later, on September 13, 1692, a series of tremors began to shake the city, damaging some public buildings and houses. During that night, a priest named José Carrión dreamed that if the images of Christ and Mary were paraded through the streets for nine days the earthquakes would stop and Salta would be spared forever. Apparently it worked and, ever since, the Fiesta del Milagro has been a major event in the city’s calendar. Festivities and religious ceremonies starting on September 6 reach a climax on September 15, when the now-famous images, which are kept in the cathedral, are paraded through the city’s streets in a massive, solemn but colourful procession.
Iglesia San Francisco
One of the most beautiful religious buildings in the country, the Iglesia San Francisco takes up a whole block at the corner of Caseros and Córdoba. Built between 1767 and 1872, it’s an extravaganza of Italianate Neocolonial exuberance, with pure ivory-white columns contrasting with the vibrant ox-blood walls, while the profuse detailing of Latin inscriptions, symbols and Neoclassical patterns is picked out in braid-like golden yellow.
The church’s most imposing feature is its slender 54m campanile (added in 1882), towering over the low-rise Neocolonial houses of downtown Salta and tapering off to a slender spire. The highly elaborate facade of the church itself, behind a suitably austere statue of St Francis in the middle of the courtyard, is lavishly decorated with balusters and scrolls, curlicues and pinnacles, Franciscan inscriptions and the order’s shield, but the most original features are the organza-like stucco curtains that billow down from each of the three archways, nearly touching the elegant wrought-iron gates below. Inside, the decoration is a little more subdued, with a beautiful trompe l’oeil ceiling, Neoclassical altar and ornate side chapels. If you can, take a guided tour, which will get you into the cloisters and fascinating Museo del Convento, where the surprising archeological section features a perfect terracotta Etruscan head dating from the fourth century BC.
Top image: Quebrada de Cafayate, Salta, Argentina © sunsinger/Shutterstock