San Juan

The Huarpe farmed the Tulum Valley with irrigation channels before the Spanish arrived from Chile. On 13 June 1562 Juan Jufré founded San Juan de la Frontera, naming it after his patron saint, John the Baptist, and laid out a grid of 25 blocks; Jufré himself returned to Chile the same year. At the end of 1593 the San Juan River swept the town away, and it was moved 25 blocks south to its present site around what is now Plaza 25 de Mayo.

The city's most famous son, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, was born here in 1811 in the adobe house his mother had built. A fierce critic of the caudillos, he wrote Facundo in exile, governed the province in the 1860s and became president of Argentina in 1868; in 1866 his initiative founded the Franklin library. Irrigated vineyards made the valley wine country.

On the evening of 15 January 1944 an earthquake centred north of the city, near La Laja, destroyed some 90 per cent of the city's buildings, most of them adobe, and killed about 10,000 people. At a fundraiser for the victims Juan Perón met Eva Duarte. San Juan was rebuilt under a new seismic building code. Another earthquake in 1977 destroyed the town of Caucete; the new cathedral was completed in 1979, and the Ullum dam followed in 1980.

Sarmiento is everywhere: his statue stands on the main square, his birthplace became Argentina's first national historic monument in 1910, and the province's identity is bound up with his cause of public education. The Franklin library, the Franklin Rawson fine-arts museum and the Teatro del Bicentenario near Parque de Mayo anchor a cultural life that is busy for a city of its size.

The great annual celebration is the Fiesta Nacional del Sol, held over five days in the last week of February since 1972, with parades of carriages, themed exhibitions, concerts and the election of a queen from the nineteen departments. Cuyo's folk music, the tonada and the cueca cuyana, is the local sound, and the grape harvest brings its own celebrations.

Popular religion runs strong. The shrine of the Difunta Correa at Vallecito, east of the city, draws huge crowds of pilgrims, and bottles of water left for her line roads across Argentina. Sport means football — San Martín, founded in 1907, is the province's best-known club — and motor racing at El Zonda, the circuit opened in the Quebrada de Zonda in 1967 and best known for its TC 2000 races. Sanjuaninos share the Cuyo reputation for a calm, unhurried manner.

Greater San Juan had about 547,000 people at the 2022 census, the eighth-largest urban area in Argentina, spreading from the small central Capital department into Rivadavia, Chimbas, Rawson, Santa Lucía and other neighbouring departments. Most people live in low houses on wide, tree-lined streets, with taller blocks only in the centre.

Agriculture is the base of the economy, and about two-thirds of the valley's farm production is linked to wine: San Juan is Argentina's second wine-producing province and also grows olives, figs, fruit and vegetables. Gold mining in the high Andes has grown into a major industry, and there is evidence that it may be harming the province's glaciers. Provincial government, the National University of San Juan, commerce and services employ much of the city.

Life follows the heat and the water. Rain is rare, so every garden, tree and vineyard depends on the San Juan River and its dams. Shops close for the afternoon siesta and the plazas fill in the evening. When the zonda blows, temperatures jump and dust fills the air, and people stay indoors until it passes. As across Argentina, inflation and the cost of living shape household budgets.

Wine is the province's pride. San Juan is best known for Syrah, which suits its hot, sunny valleys, alongside Malbec and other reds, and the province also produces brandies, sherry-style wines and vermouth. Its vineyards lie at altitudes of roughly 600 to 1,400 metres and depend on irrigation from the San Juan and Jáchal rivers, and olive oil comes from the same irrigated valleys.

The local empanada is juicy and full of onion, and chivito, young goat roasted over an open fire, is the celebratory meat, alongside the beef asado shared across Argentina. Cuyo dishes such as tomaticán, a stew of tomato and egg, and sopaipillas, rounds of fried dough, are everyday home cooking.

The sweet speciality is the tableta sanjuanina, the local version of the alfajor, widely sold in the city. In the sunny oases, quinces, peaches and melons ripen early. Cafés around Plaza 25 de Mayo serve coffee and pastries in the morning and fill again in the early evening, after the siesta.