Dique Los Molinos & La Cumbrecita

Today, from my current base in Córdoba, I got out of town. Not that anyone in the city told me, “Get out of town!” You understand. They were all, no doubt thinking it, but they were too polite to say it.

No, that wasn’t the reason I left town. I looked at the tour booking engine I usually use and saw some tours of the surrounding countryside and towns that looked interesting, and I booked one. The tour operator calls it, “Summit and Villa General Belgrano Tour from Córdoba Capital.”

The tour makes three stops. The first stop lasts just a half-hour, where we get to take in a view of a dam, Dique Los Molinos and the lake behind it, and use the toilets if necessary.

The second is the main stop, La Cumbrecita, which is scheduled for three hours. It’s in what the tour promotional text describes as “Argentina’s first pedestrian town.”

The third stop, Villa General Belgrano, is scheduled for about an hour in a much larger, but less scenic town.

As per usual, I will break this into two posts, one for roughly the morning and one for the remainder of the day.

Because the middle stop is long, I’ll split it in two, with some in the morning post and some in the afternoon post. This, my morning post, will likely be the longer of the two.

Sound good? It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t sound good because that’s how I’m going to do it. Suck it up, folks.

Getting Started

The tour includes hotel pickups. The minibus parked on the street beside my hotel, and the guide came and fetched me. (The guide was Gaston. He didn’t do the driving. The driver’s name was Alberto. I might have the spelling of either or both of those names wrong, or maybe not just the spelling, but the whole name. But that’s what they sounded like to my Anglo ears when Gaston said them.)

When Gaston fetched me, after introducing himself, he asked me to take the seat behind him on the bus. Mentally, I guessed why.

The bus had eight rows with two seats in each row on one side of an aisle and one on the other.

When I boarded, there was already a couple in the first row of two seats, and I saw that Gaston had left his stuff in the first of the single seats. I took the single seat behind that.

Gaston followed me on board, took his seat, turned around toward me, and explained to me in accented, but otherwise quite good, easy-to-understand English, how the tour would proceed.

This included telling me that, of the twelve customers who would be on the tour, I was the only English speaker. So, he would first provide information and stories in Spanish and then tell me what he said. Ha! My guess was correct. Shades of the Córdoba tour I took the other day.

The bus made some more stops at other hotels to pick up the rest of the customers, and then we were off, first to get out of Córdoba and then onto a highway.

Córdoba

Along the way, Gaston provided considerable commentary. He followed the routine he had promised, first Spanish then English.

The bus wasn’t large. If it had a speaker system, Gaston didn’t use it. When he spoke in Spanish, he turned around, usually rising from his seat, and spoke in a loud voice that he projected toward the back and other side of the bus.

When he finished with Spanish, often lasting several minutes in a stretch, he sat down in his seat, turned around to make eye contact solely with me, and, in a quieter voice, told me what he had said in Spanish.

That’s usually how he started. “What I said was …”

While in Córdoba, he talked a lot about the city and its history. A couple of things I remember are that Córdoba was founded in 1573 by the Spanish conquistador Jerónimo (full disclosure: I had to look up the spelling to get the accent and “J” versus “G” right).

Gaston also said that Jerónimo named the new settlement Córdoba because it reminded him of the topology of Córdoba in Spain, particularly the distant mountains and the cliffs and ravines that defined the boundaries of the sections of the town. And, stealing another name from his native Spain again, he named the region Nueva Andalucía.

I found this strange. In Argentina’s Córdoba City, I haven’t seen even a hint of a mountain from any vantage point I’ve had there. There is a mostly gentle hill in town, but I haven’t seen any ravines and only one small cliff on that hill. If you were to ask me for two words to describe the topology of Córdoba, they’d be, “Mostly flat.”

Beyond Córdoba

Past Córdoba, the land was still mostly flat, but it didn’t take long before a range of mountains appeared in the distance.

The land continued flat until the foothills of those mountains. A lot of it is used for agriculture. I saw large cornfields with tall stalks that looked close to being ready for harvest.

It’s March 22nd. I have to keep reminding myself that the seasons are reversed here in the southern hemisphere. So while people back home are starting to look forward to spring, they’re heading into fall here.

Gaston said a lot of soy is grown here too. There are some small vineyards, but not a lot. This isn’t one of Argentina‘s major wine-growing regions.

As we got closer to the mountain range, Gaston said they’re called the Sierras. But there are two roughly parallel Sierra ridges here.

The ridge closest to where we were is called Sierras Chicas (small mountains). The ridge behind it is the Sierras Grandes (large mountains).

Of course, I say “behind” relative to the side from which we approached it. I don’t know if there is a local consensus on a direction-agnostic definition of which is in front and which is behind. The last thing I want to do is get a mountain range angry at me.

Who knows what tectonic forces it might summon up to do me harm with extreme prejudice? And mountains probably talk among themselves. I could be in a different mountainous part of the world and have a boulder tossed down on me to get revenge in the name of that mountain’s buddy, the Sierra Grande.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the Sierras Grandes are taller than the Sierras Chicas. If that does surprise you, you need to pay much closer attention.

We drove through a pass over the Sierras Chicas and all of our stops today were between the two mountain ranges, the first stop being a dam.

Dique Los Molinos

Dique Los Molinos translates to Los Molinos Dam in English.

I don’t know if it’s all of Argentina, but this area has hot, wet summers and cold, dry winters. They built a dam, Dique Los Molinos, to form a lake behind it that holds the water from the summer so they have adequate water all year round. Four rivers flow into the artificial lake created by the dam.

Late March, i.e., now, is the end of the rainy season. The lake was full when we were there and water was gushing over the top of the dam, forming a roaring waterfall.

The bus drove along a road above the top of the dam and stopped a little piece farther along at a cluster of touristy, low-end restaurants, shops selling souvenirs, and shops selling cheese and sausages. The view of the lake, which is quite beautiful, was mostly blocked by those businesses at that point, but I was able to walk to one lookout through the buildings, as well as past both sides of the clump of them to get a great view.

I also walked back to the dam to get a look at the waterfall. Because this section is short and I didn’t take any pictures from the road, I put most of the pictures of Dique Los Molinos and its lake above.

La Cumbrecita

La Cumbrecita is a small town that was founded in 1934 by some German immigrants. Its current population is less than 200 people. The claim of it being a pedestrian town is a bit of an exaggeration. The main street, a packed-dirt road, is mostly for pedestrians. A small street, that’s not upgraded much more than that, roughly parallels the main street, behind its businesses. The other road does allow some cars. It has to be because there’s a hotel high up on the mountain beside La Cumbrecita. That road leads up to it.

Residents and hotel guests are allowed to drive on the roads in La Cumbrecita proper, although I don’t know if that includes the main street. There weren’t any cars on it when I was there.

La Cumbrecita is beside a river. On the other side of the river, there are some restaurants and a road in front of them. Cars (and tour buses) are fully allowed on that.

The main street solely contains, bars, restaurants, chocolate shops, and a few hotels. According to Gaston, the economy of La Cumbrecita is almost entirely based on tourism. There is a lot of German-style Alpine architecture along the street because of the German heritage.

At the front of the main street, there’s a pole off to the side with a series of horizontal rods attached to it. Sitting on the rods are a series of flat figures decorated with images of traditional costumes of several European countries, with flags of the countries under each as appropriate. People from those countries came here to escape the Second World War. The pole commemorates that.

Gaston volunteered, without prompting, that no Nazis came here. I wondered about that when he said that La Cumbrecita was founded by Germans. Then again, what tour guide would admit to Nazis having come here? I don’t know if I’m the only one, but even though they’d be long gone by now, I’d find that a trifle offputting to know that the Nazis came there.

After guiding us along the main street, Gaston led us up the road heading up the mountain. Partway up, there’s a cute church. It was originally built as an ecumenical church, but the little iconography in there is mostly Catholic. Gaston explained that Catholicism is by far the dominant religion in the area.

After the church, he led us down to a waterfall that dropped into a naturally formed pool. And we spent some time admiring that.

At a few points along the walk. Gaston pointed to some tall tree stumps that had been carved into artistic figures. A while back, a storm damaged some trees, killing them. A local artist carved the sculptures out of the carcasses.

Finally, he went back into town by a restaurant he recommended on the other side of the river. Lunch wasn’t included so we were on our own for that and it was up to us where we ate. I took his recommendation.

I promised above to break this post here. I’ll keep that promise. Please join me again in the next post, whenever I manage to publish that.

To be continued …