🇦🇷 Argentina · The North (NOA)
The Quebrada de Humahuaca is an Andean valley some 155 km long following the course of the Río Grande, in the north of Jujuy province, boxed in between mountain ranges that the sun paints in unbelievable colours. More than a single destination, it's a corridor: National Route 9 runs its full length, stringing together adobe villages, cardón cactus forests, craft markets and striped hills that look hand-painted. In 2003 Unesco declared it a World Heritage cultural landscape, recognising ten thousand years of human occupation and its role as an age-old trade route between the altiplano and the lowlands.
The best way to take it is as an itinerary, letting yourself drift from south to north: Volcán and Tumbaya as the gateways, Purmamarca with its Cerro de los Siete Colores, Maimará and its Paleta del Pintor, Tilcara with the Pucará and the museums, Uquía with its arquebusier angels, and the town of Humahuaca as the head of the valley, at about 2,940 metres. Each village has its own character, its market and its saint, but they all share the same Andean air: the copla, the erquencho, beef empanadas, the green of coca leaves and the warmth of the people.
The grand finale is the Serranía del Hornocal, the famous Cerro de los 14 Colores, a multicoloured rock amphitheatre at 4,350 metres that looks best in mid-afternoon, when the low sun sets each striation alight. Driving up to its viewpoint, walking the cobbled streets of Humahuaca at noon to see San Francisco Solano emerge from the cabildo, and closing the day with locro and live folk music is the perfect recipe for the gorge. Purmamarca and Tilcara have their own pages in this guide; here we focus on the whole corridor, on the town of Humahuaca, on Uquía and on the Hornocal.
The gorge was continuously inhabited for more than 10,000 years by Indigenous peoples such as the Omaguaca, and it served as a stretch of the Inca Road (Qhapaq Ñan), of the colonial route towards Upper Peru and of the wars of independence. That value as a living cultural landscape earned it the Unesco declaration in 2003. For the full story, see this destination's 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.
There are few places on the planet where you can read the history of the Earth at a glance the way you can in the Quebrada de Humahuaca: just stand in front of the Hornocal in mid-afternoon to see, folded like a stone accordion, layers of sediment laid down when the Andes didn't yet exist. This valley of some 155 kilometres, carved by the Río Grande in the northwest of Jujuy province, is a natural gorge connecting the altiplano (the Puna, above 3,500 metres) with the temperate valleys to the south, which is why it has always been an unavoidable transit corridor: first for llama caravans, then for armies, and today for travellers driving it on National Route 9.
The famous coloured hills aren't the work of a painter but of millions of years of geological history. The striped slopes you see in Purmamarca (Cerro de los Siete Colores), in Maimará (the Paleta del Pintor) and, above all, in the Serranía del Hornocal are layers of marine and continental sediment laid down across different eras and later folded, uplifted and eroded by the rise of the Andes. Each colour band corresponds to a different mineral: iron oxides for the reds and ochres, carbonates and clays for the greens, greys and whites.
The Hornocal, at 4,350 metres, is the most spectacular case: a great amphitheatre of limestone bent into sharp folds that the afternoon sun sets alight in up to fourteen shades. The arid climate, with little vegetation to cover the rock, leaves the whole palette on display, and it's precisely that combination of geology and light that makes the gorge one of the most photographed landscapes in Argentina.
The gorge was continuously inhabited for more than 10,000 years. Because of its geography as a passageway, it was a place of transit and exchange of people, goods and ideas between the Andean altiplano, the lowlands of the Chaco and the valleys to the south, and between the Atlantic and the Pacific. That long occupation left a remarkable density of archaeological sites, farming terraces, petroglyphs and ancient settlements.
When the Europeans arrived, the central and northern part of the gorge was inhabited by the Omaguaca (or Humahuaca), a confederation of related ethnic groups that gives the region its name. They were farmers — of corn above all — who built Andean-style terraces to work the stony ground, herded llamas, mastered weaving and pottery and smelted metals such as bronze for tools and weapons. In the central section lived groups such as the Tilcara.
The most visible testimony of that era is the Pucará de Tilcara, an extensive pre-Hispanic settlement built on a hill at the confluence of the Huasamayo and Grande rivers, with origins around the 12th-13th century AD. It was partly reconstructed during the 20th century. Recent research debates its character: although it has traditionally been called a 'pucará' (fortress), its elevated position and wide view of the surroundings are not matched by clear defensive features, so its function may have been residential and ceremonial as much as strategic.
Towards the middle of the 15th century the Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu) extended its rule over northwestern Argentina, and the Quebrada de Humahuaca was folded into its great road network: the Qhapaq Ñan or Inca Road, a system of routes that tied the whole empire back to Cusco. The gorge, with its geography as a natural passage joining the Puna to the valleys in the south, was an ideal artery for moving armies, llama caravans, officials and messengers (chasquis), as well as for circulating goods such as metals, textiles, coca leaves and farm produce.
That role as a trade route didn't begin with the Incas: they consolidated and formalised a corridor local populations had been using for millennia. The Inca presence left its mark on how the territory was organised, on some farming and building techniques, and on cultural traits that still endure, above all in music and festivals.
That role as a living road of cultural exchange is precisely the core of the universal value Unesco recognised in 2003. The Qhapaq Ñan as a whole was also declared a World Heritage Site in 2014 as a cultural route shared by several Andean countries, which reinforced the gorge's place in that great historic network.
After the Spanish conquest, the gorge became a key link in the royal road joining the Río de la Plata with Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia) and the rich mining zone of Potosí. Mules, goods and travellers moved up and down this route, and villages, way stations, chapels and haciendas sprang up along it. From that colonial period come gems such as the Iglesia de San Francisco de Paula in Uquía (completed in 1691), famous for its series of Ángeles Arcabuceros — nine canvases of early American Baroque showing angels dressed as soldiers — and the many adobe churches with altarpieces and religious sculpture of Cusco lineage.
With the wars of independence, from 1810 onwards, the gorge became a hot frontier: patriot and royalist armies passed through it again and again in their struggle over the north. The most remembered episode is the Jujuy Exodus of August 1812: faced with the royalist advance, General Manuel Belgrano ordered the people of Jujuy to abandon everything and withdraw southwards, destroying crops and goods so as to leave the enemy nothing of use. Men, women, children and the elderly obeyed, in one of the most moving feats of Argentine independence.
The town of Humahuaca keeps the memory of those heroic years in its Monument to the Heroes of Independence, an imposing work by the sculptor Ernesto Soto Avendaño that crowns the town and honours those who fought for freedom in these frontier lands.
On 2 July 2003 the Quebrada de Humahuaca was inscribed on Unesco's World Heritage List in the cultural landscape category. It wasn't recognised only for the beauty of its hills, but for something deeper: for bearing witness to a continuous, millennia-old relationship between people and a mountain environment, and for its historic role as a route of transit and exchange between the Andean altiplano and the plains to the south.
The declaration values the traces of more than 10,000 years of occupation: the pre-Hispanic terrace and road systems, the remains of the Inca passage, the colonial villages and chapels of the royal road, and the living heritage of today's communities, which keep inherited beliefs, rituals, festivals, music, art and farming techniques. It is, in Unesco's own words, a living cultural landscape, where heritage value isn't frozen in ruins but embodied in people who still live in and cultivate the valley.
Since that recognition the gorge has become a first-rank tourist destination, which has brought development but also friction: the growth of tourism, pressure on land and the coexistence of heritage conservation with the everyday life of the Indigenous communities are still open questions, two decades after the declaration.
The gorge isn't a museum: it's a living Andean culture that beats in its festivals and its music. The Carnaval de Humahuaca is its most intense expression. It has Indigenous, Spanish and creole roots, and because the gorge was an unavoidable route towards Peru and Bolivia it also absorbed traits from those traditions, many of Inca origin. It begins with the unearthing of the carnival devil — a doll pulled from a cairn or apacheta — and unleashes nine days of music, dancing, flour, basil and comparsa troupes, before the devil is 'buried' again at the end.
In the weeks beforehand come the Thursdays of compadres and comadres, gatherings where people meet to copliar: to sing coplas, short improvised verses about love, life and what happened during the year, accompanied by the caja, a small double-headed drum. The copla is the sonic heart of the gorge, and you hear it at carnivals, at peñas and at get-togethers, alongside instruments such as the erquencho, the siku, the quena and the charango.
Add to that the syncretic religious devotion — patron saint festivals, pilgrimages, offerings to the Pachamama in August — the wool and ceramic craftwork, and the high-altitude cooking with its humitas, tamales, locro and llama dishes. Travelling the gorge today means glimpsing a culture still being woven among the coloured hills, as ancient as it is contemporary.