Mendoza

The Huarpe people farmed the valley of the Mendoza River with irrigation channels long before the Spanish came over the Andes from Chile. Pedro del Castillo founded the city on 2 March 1561 and named it after García Hurtado de Mendoza, the governor of Chile; the following year Juan Jufré moved it a short distance west. The open acequias that still run beside every street, watering the city's trees, descend from that irrigation system. Mendoza belonged to the Captaincy General of Chile until 1776, when it passed to the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.

After independence the province of Cuyo was created with José de San Martín as governor, and from Mendoza he organised and trained the Army of the Andes, which crossed the mountains in 1817 to free Chile and then Peru. On the night of 20 March 1861 an earthquake of about magnitude 7.2 destroyed the colonial city and killed at least 5,000 people. A new city was laid out about a kilometre to the south-west: the French surveyor Julio Balloffet's plan of 1863 placed a large central square with four smaller plazas around it, with wide streets and pavements meant to give space and escape routes in future quakes.

The railway's arrival in the 1880s, together with Italian and Spanish immigrants, turned Mendoza into Argentina's wine capital. In the twentieth century the suburbs of Godoy Cruz, Guaymallén, Las Heras and Luján de Cuyo grew far faster than the city proper, and today they hold most of the metropolitan population. Further earthquakes, in 1985 and 2006, have kept seismic design a constant concern.

The year turns on wine, and its peak is the Fiesta Nacional de la Vendimia, first held in 1936. Each of the province's departments elects a harvest queen; the festival opens with the Catholic blessing of the fruits, the queens ride through the city on illuminated floats in the night parade of the Vía Blanca and again in the next morning's Carrusel, and the Acto Central — a huge staged spectacle of dance, music and theatre — is performed in the Frank Romero Day open-air theatre in the hills of Parque San Martín, ending with the crowning of the national queen and fireworks. Mendoza is one of the Great Wine Capitals network.

Cuyo's own folk music is the tonada and the cueca cuyana, played on guitars, and it sounds distinct from the folk music of the northwest. The Teatro Independencia is the main stage for drama and classical music, and the National University of Cuyo, whose symphony orchestra has played since the 1940s, gives the city a large student population and a busy cultural calendar. San Martín is the city's hero: his army is commemorated on the Cerro de la Gloria, and the feast of Santiago, patron of the province, is kept each July.

Football divides the metropolitan area between Independiente Rivadavia, from the city, and Godoy Cruz Antonio Tomba, from the neighbouring city of the same name, with Gimnasia y Esgrima as a third old club. The afternoon siesta is still kept.

The city of Mendoza itself is small — about 127,000 people at the 2022 census — but Greater Mendoza had about 1.06 million, the fourth-largest urban area in Argentina and more than half the province's population. Most people live in the surrounding departments of Godoy Cruz, Guaymallén, Las Heras, Maipú and Luján de Cuyo, in low-rise neighbourhoods of houses and small apartment blocks, while the centre holds the government offices, banks, shops and universities.

Wine dominates the economy and the landscape: Mendoza Province makes nearly two thirds of Argentina's wine, and vineyards, olive groves and fruit farms ring the city. Oil, olive oil, tourism, commerce and education add to it, and the city is the staging post for climbers heading for Aconcagua and skiers bound for the Andes resorts.

Life follows the heat. Shops close for a long afternoon break and reopen into the evening, when the plazas, the pedestrian streets and the bars of Arístides Villanueva fill. Commuters use buses and the Metrotranvía light rail, which opened in 2012. Water is the constant issue: the acequias that water the street trees draw on rivers born in the glaciers of the Andes. As across Argentina, inflation and the cost of living shape household budgets.

Mendoza eats and drinks around its wine. Malbec, brought from France in the 19th century, thrives on the high, sunny slopes and is the province's signature, alongside Cabernet Sauvignon and Tempranillo. Wineries in Maipú and Luján de Cuyo open for tastings and long lunches, and Maipú's flat roads make it the place where visitors cycle between wineries and olive-oil producers.

The local empanada, the empanada mendocina, is large and made with olives and garlic. Chivito, young goat, is roasted over an open fire, and the weekend asado of beef, chorizo and morcilla is as central here as anywhere in Argentina. Tomaticán is a simple dish of tomato and egg, and tortitas mendocinas, not to be confused with fried tortitas, are a provincial speciality.

The irrigated valleys supply olives and olive oil, dried fruit, nuts, garlic and quince paste, dulce de membrillo, which is eaten with cheese. In the city, grill restaurants line Avenida Sarmiento west of Plaza Independencia, and Arístides Villanueva is the strip for bars and late dinners; in summer, ice cream and cold drinks keep the plazas busy into the night.