Purmamarca, a short detour west on Ruta Nacional 52, is the first stop for most travellers. The village is a Lugar Histórico Nacional, declared in 1975: whitewashed adobe houses, a church and its atrium on the plaza, and behind them the Cerro de los Siete Colores. Maimará, 71 km from San Salvador de Jujuy on Ruta 9, faces the Paleta del Pintor, a ridge of painted strata seen from a roadside lookout, with a hillside cemetery beside it.
Tilcara holds the Pucará de Tilcara, the largest pre-Hispanic settlement in the Quebrada and a Monumento Histórico Nacional since 2000. It covers about 18 hectares, has some 600 stone enclosures linked by paths, and was remodelled by the Inca in the fourteenth century. Further north, beyond the town of Humahuaca, a gravel road climbs to the lookout over the Serranía de Hornocal, a mountain front of zigzag colour bands run by the Comunidad Aborigen de Hornocal.
This is a lived-in landscape: the villages, the farmland and the archaeological sites belong to communities who still use them, and some places are sacred to them. Most of our clients come for two or three nights from Salta or San Salvador de Jujuy: couples, eloping pairs, travellers and content creators, who give the Quebrada its own days rather than a single excursion.
