Villa Carlos Paz

The Comechingones and other Indigenous peoples lived along the rivers and streams of the valley before the Spanish arrived, and for centuries afterwards the land was ranch country. The key change came in the 1880s, when engineers dammed the Suquía and Cosquín rivers to supply the city of Córdoba with water and irrigation. The San Roque dam, designed in 1884 by the firm of Cassaffousth, Bialet Massé and Dumesnil and officially opened in 1890, created the lake beside which the town would grow.

The rancher Carlos Nicandro Paz founded the town in 1913. A mountain track, the Hanging Bridges Trail, was built in 1918 to link it with the Traslasierra valley; in the 1950s it was replaced by the Camino de las Altas Cumbres. The original dam was replaced by a larger one about 150 metres away, completed in 1944 under Governor Amadeo Sabattini.

Hotels, schools and housing followed as the town became a leading resort in the Sierras, and from the 1970s it developed its summer theatre season. The lakeside Costanera was finished in 2011. The streets have served as a stage of the Rally Argentina and the town was on the route of the Dakar Rally in 2015 and 2016. In October 2023 a wildfire forced the evacuation of the town.

Carlos Paz is above all a summer stage. Since the 1970s companies from Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Santa Fe have brought comedies, revues and music shows to its theatres each January and February, and together with Mar del Plata it offers the widest choice of summer shows in Argentina.

The town's emblems are known across the country: the giant cuckoo clock built by German settlers, the chairlift to Cerro La Cruz, the theatres, the rally, the Costanera, the casinos and the nightclubs. It is a place of families and groups of friends on holiday, and its nightclubs are among its best-known emblems.

Life outside the season is that of a hill town with a strong local identity, a sports club founded in 1930 when the village had about 500 people, and regattas on the lake. The music of the province — cuarteto in the clubs, folk in the peñas and at the Cosquín festival up the valley — is the soundtrack of the summer.

The 2022 census counted about 71,000 people in Villa Carlos Paz, making it the fourth-largest city in the province of Córdoba, and about 80,000 with the neighbouring towns of San Antonio de Arredondo and Villa Río Icho Cruz. The population swells many times over in summer and on long weekends.

Tourism is the economy: hotels, cabañas and campsites, restaurants, theatres, shops and services. Many residents work long hours in the season and more quietly the rest of the year. Neighbourhoods spread along the river and up the slopes around the lake, from the dense centre to houses among the hills.

Water and fire shape local concerns. The lake supplies Córdoba with water, and its waters suffer from eutrophication, which specialists are working to reverse. Dry winters and springs bring the risk of wildfires, which threatened the town in 2023. Traffic and the strain of the summer crowds on services are the other recurring complaints.

Carlos Paz eats as the Sierras do. Asado is the centre of summer life, at the grills of the river balnearios as much as at home, and the town's parrillas, pizzerias and pasta houses stay busy late into the night in the theatre season. Empanadas, milanesas and locro, the stew of maize, beans and meat, are standard, and the ice-cream parlours of the centre are part of every summer evening.

The souvenir that matters is the alfajor serrano, the alfajor of the hills, sold in shops all over town; Córdoba's own version is filled with fruit jelly, usually quince. Shops selling productos regionales offer the smoked cheeses, preserves and salami of the Sierras, including the salame of Colonia Caroya, a town settled by Friulian immigrants.

To drink, there is Fernet with cola, the province's favourite, mate shared on the beach, and beer from the German-influenced towns of the Calamuchita valley further south, where Villa General Belgrano holds a national beer festival each October.