La Cumbrecita & Villa General Belgrano

Previously on Joel’s Journeys and Jaunts, I left you just before lunch in a town at the base of the Sierras Chicas, La Cumbrecita, during my day trip out of Córdoba, Argentina. So, let’s pick up the exciting action from there, shall we? Like you have a choice.

But, after that build-up, I’m going to ask you to indulge me for just a bit first. I want to provide a brief programming note.

I have a flight out of Córdoba at 1:00 in the afternoon tomorrow to head to my next destination in Argentina.

That implies two things. For one, I probably won’t have enough time in the morning to do anything worth writing about. So this will almost certainly be my last post from Córdoba. (I arrive at my next destination early enough that I probably will publish a first impressions post from there tomorrow.)

The second implication is that because this is probably my last post from Córdoba, I’ll include a Córdoba summary section at the end of this post.

Okay. Programming note over. Let the action continue. Are you as excited about that as I am?

Lunch in La Cumbrecita

In my morning post, I told you that I took the advice of the tour guide, Gaston, as to a lunch restaurant. The one he recommended is across the small river from the main part of the little town of La Cumbrecita.

It’s also up a slight hill. The restaurant has an indoor restaurant, but it also has outdoor tables on a deck. Today was brilliantly sunny and warm. I chose the deck.

I was fortunate enough to get a somewhat shaded table, just one table back from the front of the deck.

I say “fortunately” not just for the shade, although that too, but primarily for the view that being close to the front of the deck afforded me. I looked out onto a wedge of a valley, with attractive alpine-style homes in it and a rugged mountain in the background.

It was a stunning setting for lunch.

Before I went in, Gaston told me that a lot of people recommend the German sausage, but, he said that if I wanted the local cuisine, the trout is very good and it’s caught in the nearby lakes.

I was in La Cumbrecita, dammit, not Germany. I wanted the local cuisine. I had the trout and a side salad. It was very good. I also ordered a glass of wine because, with that view laid out before me, this was a lunch I wanted to linger over.

After lunch, I still had about twenty minutes before the scheduled departure of the bus. I used it to take a closer look at the small muddy river as it passed by La Cumbrecita and walked partway back up the main street to soak up the last bit of that flavour.

La Combrecita is a very attractive town, with the architectural charm of German alpine heritage. And, how can you go wrong with a mountain for scenery?

If it has one drawback it’s this: It is very much a tourist town and the place was lousy with them, or should I say, us. However, based on the language(s) I heard spoken in the streets, I was one of the very few, maybe the only, English-speaking tourist there today.

Villa General Belgrano

Villa General Belgrano, a little more than a half-hour drive from La Cumbrecita, is another town of about the same vintage as La Cumbrecita—established in 1930—that was also founded by German immigrants. Its current population is over 8,000.

Villa General Belgrano is not as interesting or attractive as La Cumprecita. Its streets are not pedestrian streets, but rather paved roads with no vehicle restrictions. Plus, the streets in Villa General Belgrano are much flatter and the mountains are farther off.

Gaston said the town’s claims to fame are pastries, beer, and chocolate.

The town has a main street of several shop-lined blocks. There is a public square, or more accurately a public oval, at one end of the shop-lined portion of the main street. (The road splits around the oval.) There are large “Oktoberfest” signs at either end of the grass-and-trees oval/square. There’s also a large, brown sculpture of an Octoberfest character in lederhosen in the middle of the oval/square.

A nice sidewalk runs down the centre of the oval/square, with lots of benches on either side of the sidewalk.

As you can guess, Villa General Belgrano has an Octoberfest. According to Gaston, it’s a really big deal. However, they’re thinking of moving Octoberfest to November. There used to be a long weekend in October, but that’s been ended. However, there is a long weekend in November. The extra day off for people means more traffic for Octoberfest.

Gaston said that Villa General Belgrano also has a major pastry festival, but I forget when that is.

Our time in Villa General Belgrano wasn’t guided. Gaston suggested that, for the little more than an hour we had in town, we might want to stroll up and down the main street, do some shopping, and enjoy one of the town’s specialties, either a beer or a coffee and pastry.

I skipped the shopping pastry and beer. Instead, I strolled up and down the street, but I also sat for a spell in the oval/square and stopped for a gelato and sat and enjoyed that. It was a hot day.

And with that, the bus headed back to Córdoba and I ended my day.

Córdoba (Argentina) Summary

I very much liked Córdoba, Argentina. It is friendly, human-scaled, enjoyable to walk around, and has some beautiful architecture, but also a lot of just very pleasant architecture. That having been said, I stuck pretty much to the central part of town, which is where my hotel was and where almost all of the sights listed in my guidebook and waking tour app were. I don’t know much about what the city is like beyond that.

However, on today’s tour, I was neither the last hotel pickup nor the first hotel drop-off. So I got to see some of the rest of the city as the bus made its rounds of hotels. It passed through some interesting and lively-looking neighbourhoods that I didn’t get to see. I also saw a few modern high-rises that I hadn’t seen in my narrow circle within the city.

I was here for four nights, which translates into three full days, plus a part of the afternoon on the day I arrived. Based on what was in my guidebook and walking tour app, that was probably an adequate amount of time in Córdoba. There wasn’t much else in them that interested me that I didn’t get to. So, if I hadn’t gone on that tour, I would have been struggling to figure out what else to do with my time.

Then again, considering the neighbourhoods that the bus passed through, maybe I should have dug a little deeper and done more random exploring with the hope of stumbling on those.

The bottom line is, if you’re going to come to Argentina, its version of Córdoba is worth a visit.