Cordoba

Cordoba surprised me in a way that Buenos Aires, for all its magnetic pull, never quite managed. It is Argentina’s second city, but the Cordobeses I met didn’t seem to care much about that ranking — they were too busy defining themselves on their own terms. Where Buenos Aires looks outward across the Atlantic, Cordoba looks inward — toward the sierras rising at its western edge, toward the six universities that fill its streets with an energy I felt the moment I stepped off the bus, toward a cultural identity so distinct that people here speak with their own accent, crack their own jokes, and carry their own loyalties. The city hummed with a creative restlessness that Buenos Aires, for all its grandeur, sometimes couldn’t match.

The historic center anchored itself around the Manzana Jesuitica — the Jesuit Block — a UNESCO World Heritage Site that preserves the oldest university buildings in Argentina. I spent a slow afternoon moving through it, trying to get my bearings. The Jesuits arrived in the early seventeenth century and built a complex of churches, residences, and educational halls that became the intellectual heart of colonial South America. The Iglesia de la Compania de Jesus stopped me cold — the barrel-vaulted ceiling of Paraguayan cedar is one of the most beautiful church interiors I’ve seen anywhere on the continent, and I’ve seen a fair number. Scattered across the surrounding countryside, the Jesuit estancias — rural estates at Alta Gracia, Jesus Maria, Caroya, and others — form a constellation of UNESCO sites we drove out to on a long day trip, each one speaking to the order’s extraordinary ambition and its deep entanglement with the land, its labor, and the indigenous peoples who worked it.

The neighborhood of Nueva Cordoba pulsed with a different kind of energy entirely. Lia and I wandered the bars and cafes along Rondeau and Hipolito Yrigoyen late on a Wednesday night — which felt like a Saturday — watching students from the National University crowd every table and spill out onto the sidewalks. The drink of choice here is not wine or beer but fernet con coca — the bitter, herbaceous Italian digestif mixed with Coca-Cola in proportions that would horrify an Italian. I’d had fernet before, in Buenos Aires, as a digestif after a long meal. Here it arrived in a half-liter plastic cup at nine in the evening and nobody blinked. Fernet is to Cordoba what mate is to the rest of Argentina: an identity marker, a social ritual, a mild obsession worn as a badge of regional pride. The city consumes more fernet per capita than anywhere else in the world, and the locals will tell you this within about twenty minutes of meeting you.

Beyond the city, the Sierras de Cordoba unfold in waves of green, granite-studded hills that feel gentler and more intimate than the Andes to the west. Rivers cut through valleys where small towns have developed distinct personalities over generations.

We drove out to Villa General Belgrano one afternoon and found something I genuinely wasn’t expecting — a town founded by German and Austrian settlers, some of them survivors of the Graf Spee, where the half-timbered architecture and bakeries feel transplanted wholesale from Central Europe. It holds the largest Oktoberfest in South America, which in October draws crowds that seemed improbable in these quiet Andean foothills. Further into the hills, La Cumbrecita is car-free — we parked at the entrance and walked in along a forest track to reach a village of stone lodges where the only sounds were birdsong and a mountain stream rushing somewhere below the path. Two hours from Cordoba’s university bars and it felt like another world entirely.

The Camino de las Altas Cumbres, a mountain highway that climbs to over two thousand meters on its way to the Traslasierra valley, is one of the great drives I’ve done in Argentina. Lia navigated while I handled the curves, and we pulled over twice for condors circling above rocky outcrops and once for a viewpoint where the sierras dropped away to reveal the vast western plains in a way that made us both go quiet for a moment. The Traslasierra — the land behind the mountains — is drier and quieter than the eastern slopes, with towns like Mina Clavero and San Javier offering thermal rivers and a pace so unhurried it attracts Argentines who need to escape both Buenos Aires and Cordoba itself.

The craft beer scene in Cordoba had exploded by the time we arrived, giving Bariloche serious competition for the title of Argentina’s brewing capital. I liked the taprooms in Guemes best — renovated colonial houses where live music started around midnight and vintage markets filled the courtyards on weekends. Cuarteto provided the soundtrack most nights: a frenetic, accordion-driven dance music born in Cordoba’s working-class neighborhoods, infectious and democratic and absolutely impossible to ignore. I didn’t know how to dance it. Neither did Lia. We tried anyway.

When to go: March through May and September through November offer the most comfortable temperatures for exploring both the city and the sierras. Summer (December through February) is hot and coincides with university holidays, quieting the city’s student energy considerably — I’d avoid it. Winter is mild but can be chilly in the higher sierras. The cuarteto festival in January and Oktoberfest in October are worth planning around.