🇦🇷 Argentina · Cuyo
Mendoza is the capital of the province of the same name and the wine capital of Argentina: a bright, tree-lined city at the foot of the Andes, right in the middle of Cuyo. It is the perfect base for touring the wineries of Maipú, Luján de Cuyo and the Uco Valley — the cradle of Argentine malbec — for heading into the high Andes towards Aconcagua, the roof of the Americas, or simply for enjoying its dry climate, its food and its friendly pace.
The city has a very particular personality, marked by one dramatic event: the 1861 earthquake, which destroyed it almost completely and forced a rebuild with a new urban plan designed to stand up better to quakes. Hence its wide streets and sidewalks, its big plazas (Plaza Independencia and the four plazas around it) and its famous acequias, the irrigation channels that run through the city and keep its trees alive in the middle of a semi-desert.
Its great green jewel is Parque General San Martín, an enormous park laid out at the end of the 19th century, with its lake, its rose garden and the Cerro de la Gloria, crowned by the Monument to the Army of the Andes. Because Mendoza is also San Martín country: this is where José de San Martín prepared the Crossing of the Andes that freed Chile and Peru. Wine, mountains, history and good living: Mendoza has it all.
Mendoza was founded on March 2, 1561 by Pedro del Castillo, sent from Chile, in the Huentota valley, under the name Ciudad de Mendoza del Nuevo Valle de La Rioja. Between 1814 and 1817 it was the center where José de San Martín, governor of Cuyo, assembled the Army of the Andes for the historic Crossing of the mountains. In 1861 a devastating earthquake destroyed it and killed thousands of people, forcing a rebuild on a new earthquake-resistant plan. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
At 8:36 p.m. on March 20, 1861, while thousands of Mendoza families sat down to dinner, the ground split open and in less than a minute wiped an entire city off the map: more than 4,000 people died out of a population of barely 11,500, almost four in every ten residents. That instant, not the founding, is the key to understanding why Mendoza looks the way it does today. But the story starts three centuries earlier, with a founding that came, unlike almost every other Argentine city, from the west rather than the east.
Mendoza was founded on March 2, 1561 by captain Pedro del Castillo, in the Huentota valley, home to the Huarpe people. The expedition came from Chile, sent by García Hurtado de Mendoza, governor of Chile and son of the viceroy of Peru, and in his honor the new city was named Ciudad de Mendoza del Nuevo Valle de La Rioja. For centuries, Mendoza and the whole Cuyo region depended administratively on Chile and on the Captaincy General of Chile, separated from the rest of today's Argentine territory by the Andes. That westward gaze, towards Chile and the Pacific, shaped much of its colonial history.
The Huarpe, who were already farming with irrigation canals before the Spanish arrived, left the region a mastery of water in a semi-desert environment: the acequias that still run through the city and water its trees have their roots in that pre-Hispanic tradition. Without that inherited irrigation system, the green, shaded Mendoza tourists know today — so surprising in the middle of the Cuyo desert — simply would not exist.
The most glorious chapter in Mendoza's history came at the start of the 19th century, in the middle of the war of independence. In September 1814, José de San Martín was appointed governor-intendant of Cuyo and settled in Mendoza with an audacious plan: to cross the Andes in order to free Chile and, from there, to attack the center of Spanish power in Peru by sea. It was no small plan: it meant moving an entire army through mountain passes above 3,000 meters, something many European soldiers of the day considered madness.
For almost two and a half years, Mendoza became the great barracks and workshop of that undertaking. The whole of Cuyo threw itself into equipping the Army of the Andes: weapons, uniforms, horseshoes and supplies were made in improvised workshops; thousands of mules and horses were gathered from the region's estancias; the women of Mendoza — the celebrated 'niñas patricias' — donated their jewels to fund the campaign. On September 30, 1816, the troops moved into the El Plumerillo camp, some eight leagues from the city, in what is now the department of Las Heras.
The figures for the army that finally set out are astonishing for the period: some 5,000 men in all, among them 3 generals, 28 senior officers, 207 officers and 3,778 rank-and-file soldiers — a majority of African descent, many of them enslaved men freed in exchange for military service — plus 1,200 mounted militiamen, 16 artillery pieces, 1,600 spare horses and 9,281 mules to carry weapons and provisions over the mountains. On January 6, 1817, the Army of the Andes set off from El Plumerillo towards the mountains, in one of the most extraordinary military feats in the history of the Americas. That is why Mendoza is, above all, San Martín country, and the Cerro de la Gloria, with its Monument to the Army of the Andes, pays tribute to a collective feat that was, first and foremost, the work of the people of Cuyo.
As mentioned at the start, on the night of March 20, 1861 a catastrophe changed the face of Mendoza for good. At 8:36 p.m., an earthquake of estimated magnitude 7.2 and intensity IX on the Mercalli scale shook the city and destroyed it almost completely in less than a minute. Official figures put the death toll at 4,247 — other sources raise it to between 4,000 and 6,000 — out of a population of some 11,500, with around 1,000 injured. According to specialists it was one of the most disastrous earthquakes of the 19th century anywhere in the world and, without question, the most catastrophic in Argentine history.
The tragedy did not end with the collapse. Because the quake struck at dinner time, hundreds of household fires combined and set off blazes that consumed much of what was left standing; on top of that, the acequias and irrigation canals overflowed, flooding streets and rubble. The colonial Cabildo, the seat of government, and the Basilica of San Francisco — the city's great Jesuit and later Franciscan church — were reduced to ruins; today their remains, the Ruinas de San Francisco, are one of the few visible traces of pre-1861 Mendoza.
The rebuild was a chance to rethink everything. Instead of raising the new city exactly on the ruins, a new center was laid out slightly to the southwest, with a modern urban plan designed to stand up better to quakes: wide streets and sidewalks, regular blocks and, above all, large open spaces where people could take refuge if the ground shook again. That is how Plaza Independencia was born at the heart of it, along with the four plazas around it — España, Italia, Chile and San Martín — also conceived as places of refuge in the event of an earthquake. That look of plazas, wide avenues, acequias and trees, which today makes Mendoza one of the most pleasant cities to walk in all of Argentina, is in fact the urban scar of a tragedy the city still commemorates every March 20.
Mendoza always had vines — the first settlers and the religious orders planted them from the 16th century — but its transformation into the country's great wine capital came with the modernization of the late 19th century. Two factors were decisive: the arrival of the railway, which in 1885 connected Mendoza with Buenos Aires and opened up an enormous market for its wines, and European immigration, above all Italian, Spanish and French, which brought vine stock, techniques and a wine culture.
It was a French immigrant who introduced malbec, the grape that would in time become Argentina's emblem. Drawing on snowmelt from the mountains — managed through the old system of acequias and irrigation — and on the altitude of its valleys, Mendoza built a thriving wine industry that today produces most of Argentina's wine. Maipú, Luján de Cuyo and the Uco Valley became world-renowned wine areas, and wine tourism turned the province into an international destination.
Today's Mendoza is one of the most enjoyable cities in Argentina: bright, tree-lined, orderly and dry, at the foot of the Andes. Its layout of plazas and wide avenues — an inheritance of the earthquake — sits alongside the green of its trees, watered by the acequias, in the middle of a semi-desert. Parque General San Martín, designed by Carlos Thays at the end of the 19th century, is its great green lung, with the Cerro de la Gloria and its San Martín monument.
But the real magnet of Mendoza is what surrounds it: the wineries along the wine roads, where you taste malbec among vines and mountains; and the high Andes, with Aconcagua — the roof of the Americas, at almost 7,000 meters — as the great objective for mountaineers from all over the world, plus more accessible trips towards Uspallata, Puente del Inca and the border with Chile. Wine capital, adventure base and a city of good food and better weather, Mendoza condenses the best of Cuyo.