🇦🇷 Argentina · The North (NOA)
Purmamarca is one of those villages that look hand-painted. It sits in the Quebrada de Humahuaca, deep in the Jujuy puna, at about 2,190-2,320 m above sea level (sources vary depending on where in the village you measure), and it lives in the shadow of its most famous postcard: the Cerro de los Siete Colores, a rock wall striped in reds, ochres, greens and purples that shifts tone with the angle of the sun. It's small, with dirt streets, adobe houses and a slow pace that makes you want to stay.
The heart of the village is Plaza 9 de Julio, ringed by a permanent craft market selling textiles, ponchos, llama-wool hats, ceramics and regional products such as quinoa and Andean sweets. Facing the square stands the Iglesia de Santa Rosa de Lima, a colonial gem from the mid-17th century, and beside it the historic algarrobo, a centuries-old tree under whose shade tradition says Belgrano's Army of the North rested.
Beyond the photos, Purmamarca is the gateway to the Cuesta de Lipán and the Salinas Grandes, that white desert at over 4,000 metres. This is living Andean culture: music, looms, llamas grazing on the hillsides and high-altitude cooking built around quinoa, corn and llama meat. A place to walk slowly, breathe deeply (you feel the altitude) and let the colours surprise you.
An old settlement of the Indigenous peoples of the Quebrada (Omaguaca and other communities of the region), Purmamarca took colonial shape around its chapel of Santa Rosa de Lima, built in 1648 and declared a National Historic Monument. Its name, with Aymara and Quechua roots, allows for several possible translations. For the geology of the Cerro de los Siete Colores, the origin of the name and the deeper history of the village, see our Purmamarca history page.
Read the full history ↓The northernmost province, the Andean roof of Argentina: land of the Quebrada de Humahuaca and the Inca road, of the Omaguaca pucarás, of the heroic Jujuy Exodus of 1812 and of the sugar mills, with a living Andean culture of carnival, coplas and seven-colored hills.
Read the history of Jujuy →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The famous Cerro de los Siete Colores wasn't painted: it took shape over tens of millions of years. Its origin goes back to a complex geological process tied to ancient seas, lakes and rivers that laid down different sediments layer upon layer. In time, the uplift caused by the movement of the tectonic plates that formed the Andes tilted and folded those layers, leaving them exposed as a striped wall. So when you look at the hill you're reading, from the bottom up, a series of geological eras, some of them hundreds of millions of years old.
Each colour comes from a different mineral make-up. The reds come from iron-rich clays and claystones; the whitish tones from limestone and calcareous rock; the greens from phyllites and slates with copper oxide and ferromagnesian minerals; the mustard yellow from sulphur-rich calcareous sandstones; the browns and purples from sandy marls with calcium carbonate and minerals such as manganese; and the pink or salmon tones from more recent clays and mudstones. The full 'palette' shifts with the angle of the sun, which is why it's worth looking at it at different times of day.
The number 'seven' is more symbolic than literal: many visitors count more or fewer shades depending on the light. What matters is understanding that each band is a different chapter in the history of the Earth, laid bare by erosion in the heart of the Quebrada de Humahuaca.
The name Purmamarca has roots in the Andean languages, but there's no single accepted translation, and part of its charm lies there. The most widespread explanation derives it from Aymara: 'purma', meaning unsown ground, desert or land untouched by human hands, and 'marca', meaning village or town. The best-known interpretations come from that combination.
The most poetic translation, and the one locals repeat most often, is 'village of the virgin land', taking 'purma' in its sense of uncultivated or uncivilised ground. A more literal version would simply be 'village of the desert' or 'city of the desert'. There's also a Quichua (Quechua) reading that links the name to the puma, giving 'village of the puma'. These different versions coexist in tourist material and in the area's oral tradition.
Long before the Spanish arrived, the Quebrada de Humahuaca was a corridor inhabited and travelled by Indigenous peoples. The area was settled by communities tied to the Andean world, among them the Omaguaca, who left their mark on the region's place names and culture. The Quebrada worked as a natural line of communication between the puna, the valleys and the lowlands, and it fell within the Inca Empire's area of influence before the conquest.
That inheritance is still alive in Purmamarca: in the looms and the llama- and alpaca-wool textiles, in the music and the Andean instruments, in the growing of quinoa and corn, in llama herding and in the celebrations tied to the Pachamama. UNESCO's recognition of the Quebrada de Humahuaca as a World Heritage Site in 2003 highlighted precisely that value as a millennia-old cultural landscape, where human presence and the natural setting have been interwoven for thousands of years.
With Spanish colonisation, Purmamarca was organised as a pueblo de indios around its chapel. The Iglesia de Santa Rosa de Lima, facing the square, was built in 1648 and is one of the most valuable colonial churches in northern Argentina. It was declared a National Historic Monument in 1941. Its architecture is typically Andean: thick adobe walls, a roof of cardón cactus wood and packed mud, an old bell and, inside, 18th-century Cusco School paintings, a record of the region's colonial religious art.
Beside the church stands the historic algarrobo, a centuries-old tree considered the 'grandfather' of Purmamarca, with a broad canopy and enormous symbolic value for the village. Tradition says troops of the Army of the North rested in its shade during the wars of independence, which turned it into a living emblem of local history. Church, square, algarrobo and the old cabildo make up the historic ensemble the village still preserves, part of the cultural landscape recognised by UNESCO.
For centuries Purmamarca was a small, somewhat out-of-the-way village, living off herding, Andean crops and craftwork. Its great transformation came with tourism: the declaration of the Quebrada de Humahuaca as a World Heritage Site in 2003 and the growing fame of the Cerro de los Siete Colores put it on the map of the great destinations of northern Argentina. The population grew markedly in a few decades, riding that wave.
Today traditional community life coexists in Purmamarca with an ever-larger tourism infrastructure: boutique hotels, family-run guesthouses, Andean restaurants and a permanent craft market on the square. The village is also the natural base for climbing the Cuesta de Lipán and reaching the Salinas Grandes. The challenge, as everywhere in the Quebrada, is keeping the balance between welcoming visitors and preserving the cultural identity, the landscape and the unhurried pace that make Purmamarca a one-of-a-kind place.
Purmamarca doesn't end at the Cerro de los Siete Colores. Behind the village begins one of the most spectacular roads in northern Argentina: the Cuesta de Lipán, a stretch of National Route 52 that climbs in tight curves from the village's 2,192 m up to the Abra de Potrerillos, at 4,170 m, before dropping towards the Salinas Grandes. In barely 60 kilometres the landscape changes completely: from the multicoloured hills of the Quebrada you move to the bare puna, with vicuñas and llamas grazing among tussock grass, and finally to a white sea of salt stretching to the horizon.
The Salinas Grandes are one of the largest salt flats in South America after Bolivia's Uyuni and Chile's Atacama: about 212 square kilometres shared between the provinces of Jujuy and Salta, the remains of an ancient lake that dried up thousands of years ago leaving a salt crust several metres thick. The area's Indigenous communities, organised in the Cooperativa El Aguilar and other local bodies, have worked the salt for generations using evaporation pools, and today they also manage tourist access: you must hire a community guide to reach the 'ojos de agua', pools of intense turquoise that contrast with the white of the salt.
The best way to visit the salt flat from Purmamarca is on a half-day or full-day trip, either with agencies leaving from the village itself, from Tilcara or from San Salvador de Jujuy, or in a shared community minibus. There are no service stations between Purmamarca and the salt flat, so fill up before heading up. Altitude sickness is real above 4,000 metres: drink plenty of water, avoid alcohol and heavy meals, and move slowly — the advice local guides repeat most often. Many travellers combine the visit with a stop at the Abra de Potrerillos, the highest point of the route, where there are craft stalls and a panoramic view of the puna stretching towards Bolivia and Chile.
Purmamarca's calendar is still shaped by the Andean celebrations that came with the first settlers of the Quebrada and that colonisation never quite erased. The most important is the Ritual a la Pachamama, held every 1 August and throughout that month: families open a pit in the ground, the 'mouth' of the Pachamama, and offer it food, drink, coca leaves and cigarette smoke in thanks for the harvests and in request of protection for the year ahead. It's a communal ceremony, intimate and at the same time open to anyone who wants to take part respectfully.
Another key date is Carnival, which has its own identity in the Quebrada de Humahuaca: comparsa troupes, coplas sung to the beat of a caja drum, chicha and the 'unearthing' of the carnival devil mark several days of music and dancing on the square and the dirt streets. Holy Week also brings local celebrations, with processions through the village. Add to that the patron saint's festivals and the craft market, which runs every day of the year on Plaza 9 de Julio and is, in itself, a window onto everyday village life: weavers working the loom in front of tourists, quinoa and corn growers selling their harvest directly, and musicians playing sikus and quenas among the stalls.
For decades Purmamarca's economy has combined llama and sheep herding, farming on small high-altitude plots and, increasingly, tourism. That transition hasn't been free of friction: the rapid growth of tourism since the 2000s has brought more income but also more pressure on water, infrastructure and the landscape. Today the village is trying to sustain a kind of tourism that can live alongside its slightly more than three thousand inhabitants, many of whom still speak of 'the community' as the central organising unit, a direct heir of the old Andean forms of collective organisation.