A former mining boomtown in La Rioja province where a century-old cable car system still climbs the mountains above the vineyards.
Chilecito’s whole reason for existing was a mine, and I went there expecting a town defined by absence — the usual post-industrial hollowness you find in places that outlived their purpose. Instead I found vineyards planted right up against rusting iron towers, which turned out to be the more interesting story.
The Cable Carril
Between 1903 and 1926, an engineering project called the Cable Carril hauled ore down 35 kilometers from the La Mejicana mine high in the mountains to the processing plant in Chilecito, using a system of iron towers and cable cars that was, at the time, one of the most ambitious industrial builds in South America. The mine closed decades ago. The towers are still there, marching up the mountainside in a rusted iron line that looks almost sculptural against the rock now. I hiked to the first two stations with a local guide who’d grown up playing around the ruins as a kid, and he pointed out original machinery still bolted in place, left exactly where the last worker set it down.
Vineyards in the Shadow of the Mine
What nobody warned me about was the wine. Chilecito sits at serious altitude — some vineyards here climb past 1,500 meters — and the torrontés and cabernet produced in this pocket of La Rioja rival anything I tasted further north in Cafayate, without a fraction of the recognition. At a small bodega near the base of the old cable line, the winemaker poured me a torrontés and told me, with visible pride, that the same mountain water that once processed ore now irrigates his vines. Lia thought that was the best line of the whole trip.
A Town at Its Own Pace
The town itself is unhurried in a way that felt earned rather than sleepy — a central plaza with an old church, a Sunday feria selling homemade dulce de membrillo, and a museum housed in the former mining company’s administrative building, its old ledgers and machinery drawings still on display. I spent longer there than planned, mostly because the woman running the front desk kept finding one more thing she thought I should see.
When to go: March through May for harvest season in the vineyards and comfortable hiking temperatures on the old cable line route; September and October also work well before the summer heat sets in.