Quebrada de Concha, Cafayate and Quilmes

I was up before dawn this morning to catch my tour bus to Cafayate and Quilmes, located south and west of Salta.

We drove south into the Quebrada de Concha ("Shell Canyon") which is home to many cool rock formations created by water eroding the soft, sand-based rock that makes up the Quebrada:

"The Amphitheater"

"The Castles"

There´s no name for this one, just a lot of different-colored hills!

Before reaching Cafayate, we visited a bodega called Vasjia Secreta:

This is the entrance to the vineyard.

At the end of the Quebrada, we came to Cafayate, which is a small town surrounded by bodegas. There wasn´t much interesting going on in Cafayate except for the local Banco de la Nacion, which our guide pointed out had a reinforced metal roof, designed to withstand snow...which never occurs in Cafayate -- someone along the way had confused Cafayate with Calafate (in Patagonia) and sent the wrong type of pre-fabricated bank! Oops!

After Cafayate we went to Quilmes, the site of an extensive settlement created by the indigenous Quilmes people, who lived at the site from approximately 800 c.e. The Quilmes were able to resist both the Incas and also neighboring tribes, however they were defeated by the Spanish and forced to march to the suburbs of Buenos Aires, where the last descendant died by 1810. The area where they were relocated to became known as Quilmes, and and the brewery of what was to become Argentina´s national beer was first located in the Quilmes neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The ruins in Tucuman were discovered by the Army during military exercises in the 1970´s and were restored in the late 1970´s and early 1980´s: