Roaming South America

Uspallata, AR - Where the Mountain Snow Turned Me Around

October 26, 2026

Uspallata, Argentina, has a population under 4000. Uspallata is the last town if you're westbound from Mendoza to Chile. Here you are at about 2040 meters (around 6700 feet) elevation, and it's rather on the chilly side, especially at night. The town is quite small, it's referred to as a village. There is a new supermarket about a kilometer outside the town center, which means few people walk to it. In town, there's pretty much every kind of shop you'd have a need for, and two ATMs at the one bank. There are lots of shops renting winter sports gear and chains for your car.

The town was founded in, well, who knows? Long before Uspallata was a fuel stop on the road to Chile, the valley was a corridor. The Inca ran a branch of their road system through it, and traces of that route still survive in the surrounding hills, along with the petroglyphs at Cerro Tunduqueral just outside town. The Spanish came for silver. A mine was discovered here in 1638, but it sat idle for more than a century until two experienced miners were brought down from Peru in 1762 to show the people of Mendoza how to work it. The ore came from Paramillos, about 24 kilometers to the northeast, and was hauled down to the valley to be crushed and smelted in the egg-shaped adobe domes known as Las Bóvedas, which still stand two kilometers from the plaza. The English traveler Peter Schmidtmeyer crossed the pass in 1820–21 and described the area as a place of exhausted silver mines.

The valley’s best-known moment came in January 1817, when a column of San Martín’s Army of the Andes gathered here under Juan Gregorio de las Heras before crossing the cordillera to liberate Chile. Local tradition holds that Las Bóvedas served as his offices and supply depot, though hard evidence for that is thin. For the rest of the nineteenth century, the Uspallata pass was the standard overland route between Buenos Aires and Santiago, and a steady stream of foreign travelers wrote about it. The most famous was Charles Darwin, who came through in 1835 and found a stand of fossilized trees at Paramillos, still upright where they had grown. The Transandine Railway followed in 1910 and carried trains through town until 1984. Its abandoned line still shadows the highway toward the border. Much of that old rail line is visible from the highway, and quite a few of the tunnels are still there. There is a tour company that takes groups on hikes along a portion and through one of those tunnels.

This little town, this village, it is actually quite a pleasant place - it's very relaxed and very quiet. I stayed for 2 nights, which gave me a day and a half to explore the town. But it did get quite cold as the very cold mountain air made its way down to the town as I was leaving. The pass to cross into Chile was closed and till today still is. There's been some heavy snow, high winds, and well-below-freezing temps. That has caused me to change my route. I am now going back to Mendoza, then northward to Salta, and will cross the mountains to San Pedro de Atacama. So far, that route is open. But then, by the time this blog is posted a couple of weeks will have passed...