Salta
Photographers in Cafayate
Cafayate is a wine town in the south of Salta Province, in the Valles Calchaquíes, where Ruta Nacional 40 meets Ruta Nacional 68 about 193 km south of the city of Salta. Its vineyards are high: Bodega El Esteco, at the junction of the two routes, gives its own vineyards as 1,700 m above sea level and some of its plots at 2,000 m. The Instituto Nacional de Vitivinicultura registers Cafayate, or Valle de Cafayate, as a geographic indication.
The road in from Salta is half the reason people come. North of town, Ruta Nacional 68 follows the Río Las Conchas for 72 km through the Reserva Quebrada de las Conchas, created by provincial Ley 6808 in 1995 over about 25,000 ha. Its rock, laid down between 60 and 90 million years ago, is coloured red by iron oxide and carved by water and wind into formations with names: the Garganta del Diablo, the Anfiteatro, Los Castillos, El Sapo, El Fraile. The provincial rangers ask visitors to stay on marked paths, and fires, painting the rock and off-road driving are prohibited under the province's protected-areas law.
The light here is high-altitude light: hard, clear and bright from mid-morning, with deep shadows in the gorges. Sessions in the quebrada are planned for the low sun of early morning or late afternoon, when the walls glow and the canyon floors fill with reflected warmth. In town the plaza, the cathedral and the low adobe houses make a gentler backdrop, and the vineyards come right up to the edge of the streets.
Clients are mostly travellers on a road trip through Argentina's north-west: couples, honeymooners and small weddings at a bodega or a wine hotel, and wineries and hotels commissioning their own photography. Each winery and hotel is private and sets its own terms for an outside photographer, confirmed in writing.
