Salta: Museo de Antropología and More

This was my last morning in Salta. But I had the whole morning and a bit before I had to get an Uber to the Salta airport to fly to my next destination. (I’m posting this from that destination.) That left me some time to see some more sights. And, you know me, I’m never one to waste time. At least, I don’t want to waste time when I’ve spent a lot of money to travel to, sleep, and eat somewhere away from home.

There was one more sight in one of my guidebooks that looked interesting, but which I hadn’t been to yet: Museo de Antropología, which Google Translate tells me means “Museum of Anthropology.”

Almost right next door to it is a monument, not so much recommended by one of my guidebooks, but rather as the starting point for a hiking trail up Carro San Bernardo, which I didn’t have the time or strength for. I wasn’t going to bother seeing the monument, but, being so close, why not?

After seeing those two sights, I walked back to my hotel, where I’d checked out and checked my bag before setting out for the morning. When I got to my hotel, I still had more than an hour before I had to go to the airport. So, I sat down on a bench in the Plaza 9 de Julio, pulled out my phone, and looked at TripAdvisor for nearby attractions. The one that was top-rated in Salta by users was a museum that wasn’t mentioned in either of my guidebooks. And it was only a four-minute walk away. I capped off the morning by going there.

Because this is the last post about Salta (which won’t get published until I reach my next destination) you’ll find a summary of Salta at the end of it.

Güemes Monument

I came upon the monument, the Güemes Monument, just before arriving at the museum. That was an almost 25-minute walk from my hotel. The walk there and back on slightly different routes took me along pleasant Salta streets I hadn’t been on before and past a few charming homes.

In these pages from Argentina, General San Martin has popped up as one of the national heroes from the fight to gain Argentina’s independence from Spain. But he wasn’t the only one. Martín Miguel de Güemes was a revolutionary hero who was born and died in Salta, so he gets attention here.

The monument to him is in a small park with an almost enchanting cluster of trees. Nevertheless, the monument far and away dominates the park. The statue of a mounted Güemes sits on a large rock pedestal made of large and small rocks fitted and cemented together.

Güemes’s monument, and the museum described below, are at the base of Cerro San Bernardo, but a bit around the hill from the lower station of the Teleferico (cable car) up to the summit that I rode on the other day. More than just at the base, I had to walk a couple of blocks slightly up the San Bernardo hill.

Lower down, there’s a relief sculpture of soldiers that wraps around the pedestal. It’s a commanding sight.

Museo de Antropología

The Museo de Antropología is a small, attractive, purpose-built museum. The exhibits are sort of on two levels, but only because the museum is built on the San Bernardo hill. Half of the museum is a flight up from the other half, but it’s not over the lower half, simply up the hill from it.

The narrative text in the museum is in five languages. Spanish is the dominant language, and its text is printed directly on the wall. The other four languages are printed on cardstock glued to the wall. At the top of each translation was the Spanish word for what language it was. “[INGLÉS]” topped the English text.

I learned only a little ways into the museum that the other three languages were indigenous ones. When I first came across them, I recognized neither the language nor the language-heading above it. But a text panel later talked about indigenous cultures, and the names of those languages occurred in that description.

The details provided for each piece were almost exclusively in Spanish. Some pieces had numbers beside them, but I couldn’t find the placards associating the numbers with the piece data.

Museo de Antropología displays artifacts that illustrate aspects of the life of the peoples that inhabited the area that’s now Salta. However, the first text panels preceded that and went further afield to talk very briefly about human evolution in Africa and the species’ dispersion from there.

The oldest artifacts on display were pottery pieces. They had easy-to-find data placards beside them. Despite the information being in Spanish, I was able to determine that they ranged from 500 BCE to 500 CE. But I had to use Google Translate to determine that “a.C.” is the Spanish equivalent of BCE or BC and “d.C.” is the Spanish equivalent of CE or AD. That range was the narrowest they were willing to commit to for the pieces.

Because I couldn’t find data for most of the more recent pieces, I don’t know the dates of most of them.

However, there was a piece that I thought looked quite old, and I loved it. It was in a glass case by itself. There was some text, in Spanish, on a clear background on the glass. That made it difficult for Google Translate to read and translate, but by moving my phone back and forth, I found a position where it worked.

Before getting the translation, I spotted “1980s” in the text. Because it looked so old and exquisitely primitive, I figured that must have been when the museum acquired the piece. Nope.

The translation told me the piece was made by a hand, with both hollow and solid portions, and is of Chané (an indigenous South American group) origin, but it was manufactured in the 1980s. So, not that old. Harumph. I can be so easily fooled.

I found the museum, small though it may be, to be worth the walk. It helped that the walk was enjoyable, but I’d probably still say it was worth it even if the walk was somewhat less enjoyable.

Museo Güemes

When I looked at TripAdvisor, one of the reviews praised Museo Güemes and said it was an audio-visual museum with English subtitles. Sounds good.

When I got there, the ticket-seller didn’t speak English, but with the help of my lifesaver on this trip, Google Translate, I was able to determine that the entry fee was 8,000 Argeninina pesos (about $8US) and, yes, there was English.

The museum is located in the home where Güemes grew up and lived in adulthood as well. People are let in in groups, with a waiting area in a lovely courtyard.

When the assembled small crowd (about a dozen people) were let in, we entered a small room with a relief map behind glass and a screen behind it. There, a staff member gave a spiel only in Spanish that I assumed gave instructions about how the museum worked. At one point, she pointed to a circle painted on the floor. Later, she pointed to an arrow on the floor pointing to a doorway on the other side of the room. After she finished speaking, she left.

Someone in the assembled group moved forward to stand on top of the circle. An audio track started playing, along with a video on the screen behind the relief map. (There was no button, just a circle painted on the floor. There must be a sensor that somehow detects when someone is standing there.)

There were indeed subtitles. But they weren’t in English. I recognized the language. It was French. I was surprised that I knew enough French to get the gist of what it was about. It was talking about the founding of Salta, i.e., before Güemes. At some points, a spotlight highlighted an area on the map. After maybe half a minute, the video abruptly stopped. The crowd looked confused. Someone moved forward again to step on the circle.

The video started again, but not from the beginning. I assume it continued from where it left off. But then, the subtitles were in English. And they continued to be in English throughout the rest of the museum. Weird.

The arrows in each room indicated the prescribed path through the museum.

I forget how many rooms there were in the museum, about ten, I think. Each had a video with English subtitles. In some rooms, just standing on the circle didn’t quite work. Someone danced around near the front of the room and waved their hands, and it eventually started.

The videos had actors portraying Güemes and people in his life speaking as if they were the historical characters. The second room had two screens, one displaying an actor portraying Güemes’s father and the other his mother. They took turns talking about his birth and his and his siblings’ early life.

It proceeded chronologically from there.

In one room, there was a Güemes mannequin sitting at a desk, holding a pen and some paper in front of him. One of the mannequin’s arms was automated and simulated him writing. The audio in this room was Güemes (or, rather, a voice actor) speaking the contents of a letter he was writing to his father from Buenos Aires. In the letter, he wrote about the maritime battle he was leading there.

In the penultimate room, the video speaks of how Güemes was ambushed and shot by royalist forces not far from his home. It ended by telling us that the door we could see behind the translucent screen was the one he left before he was ambushed.

Güemes didn’t die immediately from his wound. The last room depicts his death, surrounded by some of his troops. It was clear that he wouldn’t survive without medical attention, but the royalist forces wouldn’t let him be taken through their lines to seek that attention.

Some officers from the royalist forces asked to come to see Güemes to make him a written offer. The offer was to allow Güemes through the line to seek medical attention on the condition that he swore never to fight against Spain again. He ripped up the offer and made his officers swear that they would die like him before they would let Spain hold any of their land.

There had been a painting done of Güemes dying. I don’t know the artist. But at the end of the video, the actors arranged themselves in the positions Güemes and his soldiers were in the painting, and the video dissolved into the painting.

Toward the end, there was a courtyard with statues of period soldiers positioned in it.

I thought the museum was well done and indeed worth the visit. But because I had to follow the prescribed flow, and it took longer than I expected, when I left the museum it was time to quick-march, or as close a resemblance to quick-marching as a man my age can do, to the hotel, retrieve my bags, and grab an Uber to the airport.

Salta Summary

I didn’t think of it before, but I’m particularly pleased to write a summary of my time in Salta because it allows me the alliteration of “Salta Summary.”

That, and I loved Salta.

The public square is generally a delight to be in. The streets around it are mostly one-way, with a single lane of traffic, and not usually particularly heavily trafficked at that. The architecture in the central area of Salta ranges from pleasantly plain to handsome and to beautiful.

What’s more, Salta is in a broad valley between two verdant mountain ranges, one of which is quite close, but both of which are visible with the naked eye if you’re in a position such that the mostly low-rise buildings don’t eclipse them. Although, as I found out when I visited Cerra San Bernardo, the closer of the two might officially be a hill range, rather than a mountain range, but they looked tall enough to me to have attained mountainhood.. Whatever it is, it’s just a beautiful setting.

The plusses of Salta far outweigh the minuses. But there are a couple of minuses. I’m hesitant to mention one of them because, well, I’ll get to that.

The one I’m not hesitant to mention involves walking. The streets are pleasant enough for a stroll, but it can be frustrating at times and may require patience.

There are a few traffic lights on some of the busier streets, but only very few. And if there were any stop signs, I didn’t see them. None.

As best I could tell from observation, here’s how I think the vast majority of the intersections in Salta are supposed to work: If a driver approaches an intersection and there’s traffic on the cross street that’s already in or close to being in the intersection, that driver stops. But it’s not like a four-way stop. People don’t take turns around the intersection, allowing one car from each cross street through at a time.

No, instead, as best I could tell, the stopped car and, obviously, any cars behind it, are expected to remain stopped until there’s a gap in the cross-street traffic. Only then do the stopped car(s) get to claim the intersection for their continuous use.

You might be thinking, “But Joel, you hate driving when you travel. You were a pedestrian in Salta, so why are you whining about these supposed road rules?”

Here’s why. Intersections have crosswalks painted on them. But, as I’ve experienced in a few other cities on my travels, they’re decorations. Cars do not stop for someone wanting to cross at them. Never.

I’ve been in some cities where this is the case, but pedestrians there will get aggressive and start walking into the street, daring cars to run them down. And the drivers usually do stop. Here, I’ve never seen anyone, local or tourist, try to assert their right to use the crosswalk. People wait for a gap to either open up naturally or because the cars going in their direction take over the intersection.

Sometimes, people will take advantage of the narrowest of gaps imaginable, dashing through them faster than I could probably run at my age. But I never saw anyone entering a crosswalk expecting cars to stop for them. Sometimes, I had to wait for quite a while to get an appropriate gap. I’m not as patient a person as I should be.

Then we come to the issue I’m hesitant to mention because I’m going to come across as a first-world snob, and I don’t want to be.

I have not done any research into Argentina’s economy. I know it’s far from the richest country in the word, but I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s destitute, including in Salta.

I didn’t see any luxury brand stores in central Salta, where I spent most of my time, but most appeared to cater to a middle-class market. People were generally casually, but not shabbily dressed. And I didn’t see any obviously homeless people in central Salta. Maybe low-end stores and the unhoused are pushed out from the core. I don’t know.

Nevertheless, in Plaza 9 de Julio and on the sidewalks close to the square, several people walk around selling stuff.

I think a few of them, very few, were asking me for money without selling me anything in return. But I’m not sure because they asked me in Spanish and, as I’ve mentioned before several times in these pages, I don’t speak Spanish.

The sellers offered eclectic wares. At lunchtime, some people walked around selling what looked like ham and cheese sandwiches on the whitest white bread I’ve ever seen. Multiple vendors sold identical-looking sandwiches.

At other times, I saw people selling small packets of facial tissues, lighters, toothpaste, chewing gum, snacks, and crafty jewelry. Different vendors sold different stuff. But by far—it wasn’t even close —the item most widely sold by the wandering street vendors was, I kid you not, socks.

Most of them were ankle socks, but also a lot of those even shorter socks that are almost completely hidden when worn with sneakers.

Yesterday, when I was looking at a menu outside a restaurant across the street from the square, someone from the restaurant tried in very stilted English to tout the restaurant. There was some English on the menu, but I couldn’t see anything that appealed to me. I indicated that to her.

She then said, “We also sell, what’s the word?” And she proceeded to pull out from, I didn’t see where, some pairs of socks.

“Socks.” “Yes, that’s the word. Socks.” “No thanks.”

The whole socks thing in Salta was surreal. How is there a large enough market for socks in Salta for there to be so many people trying to sell them on the street? Do locals wear socks once and, rather than washing them and wearing them again, throw them out and get new ones? Do, for some unknown reason, most tourists to Salta forget to pack socks and have to buy them there on the street?

Understand, these are not handcrafted socks that might make for a memorable souvenir. They’re mass-produced socks like the ones you can buy in any department store. Weird.

But that wasn’t my complaint. It was the volume of the sellers. I did end up having lunch at a restaurant with tables on a sidewalk across from the square that day. I can’t tell you how many people came up to my table wanting to sell me stuff, one of two just, I think, asking for money, and one, I’m pretty sure, wanted to shine my shoes. (He was carrying a shoeshine kit and pointing at my shoes while he said something to me in Spanish. So I don’t think he was trying to sell me the U.S. nuclear codes, but how would I know?)

Just to be clear, none of the sellers or beggars were belligerent in any way. I said, “No,” shook my head, and they immediately moved on quietly. And I didn’t mind the first few times, but the volume got to be annoying.

I felt guilty for being annoyed. They were just trying to earn a living where, for all I know, it’s possible there aren’t a lot of ways of doing so. Some times of day were thicker with sellers than others, and sometimes there were none, but the busy times got to be trying.

To be fair, though, when I got more than a block or so away from the square, the sellers thinned out to almost nothing.

And, as I said before, and I can’t stress enough, the things I liked about Salta far, far, far outweighed the things I didn’t like.

As to the amount of time I spent here, three nights (two full days) plus a morning at the tail end was about right for me. I saw all of the recommended attractions without a lot of time left over.

But I emphasized “for me” because if you are an early bird or if multi-day organized trips are your thing, you might want to spend more time in Salta or from a Salta base.

There are, I forget if it’s there or four major sights that are each about 200 kilometres from Salta in different directions. There are day tours that you can book for each (one per tour, not all in one tour). I saw pictures of the different destinations, and they all looked spectacular. However, the tours start even earlier than the one I reluctantly took in Mendoza. They all start at either 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning. Nothing started later because they have to drive four hours out and four hours back, in addition to the time spent at the stop(s). I can’t imagine much that I’d want to get going that early to see.

I didn’t check on whether there are any hotels near those destinations, but, if so, the thing to do is probably to rent a car, drive out, spend the night and then drive back or on to another destination the next day or two before returning to Salta to have access to its airport.

I don’t like driving, but I have rented cars in places where there weren’t any other reasonable options to get to where I wanted to go. Maybe I should have done that in Salta. Although, with those Salta intersections, I might not have made it out of town without totalling the rental car first.

Bye, Salta, it’s been fun. My minor criticisms notwithstanding, you were great.