Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Quilmes Ruins



On our last day in Cafayate, we visited the ruins of the oldest-known Pre-Columbian human settlement in Argentina. The Quilmes Ruins date back to 850 AD and were inhabited over the course of a thousand years. The Quilmes were a subgroup of the Las Diaguitas cultures found throughout Northeast Argentina, who emerged as nomadic hunter-gatherers and agro-pastoralists. The ruins represent their only known attempt at a city-like structure.

To get to the ruins, you take a 45-minute bus south from Cafayate (towards Tucumán). Flechabus has one that leaves around 12:30. Take it and ask to be dropped at Quilmes; the ticket shouldn't be more than 30 pesos. You'll be dropped off on the side of the highway; from there it's a five kilometer walk to the ruins. There are enough tourists in cars on this road to hitch a ride the rest of the way, which is what we did.




We arrived in mid-afternoon, with the sun shining right in the face of anyone looking at the ruins. It took a few minutes to realize what an incredible thing we were seeing. A V-shaped mountain stretches out symmetrical-ish arms to the right and left. Before you. A labyrinth of stone structures moves back into the mountain's shadow. It rises, in terraces, up the slope. Running through middle of the terraces is an escarpment of boulders; the signs say they were used as astronomical observatories and holy sites. Up on the arms of the mountain, more stone structures run along the ridges, looking like watchtowers.



You pay 20 pesos to enter the site. The fee entitles you to a free tour (which will only be in Spanish). Two guides were on duty, sitting in a bench in the shae. One of them got up and escorted us about 20 feet inside. She rushed through a three-minute schpiel that I barely understood, asked if we had any questions, and, before I could think of anything, rushed back to her bench in the shade. We meandered about for a while until the other guide (a little older) began a tour and invited us to join him. His Spanish was slow and clear and his tour lasted half an hour. The arbitrary outcomes of service in Argentina is truly a crap-shoot.

The second guide walked us further into the ruins. He explained how its thick walls were actually platforms (or elevated hallways) which the inhabitants used to walk between living spaces. Rooms were dug into the ground and housed multiple family units. They were open-air, partially covered by roofs of cactus wood. Circular structures with mortar-and-pestles found in them suggest spaces where food was prepared.

The Quilmes ruins have been partially restored, and usually this takes something away from the experience for me, but not at Quilmes. The restoration was done sparingly. The restored part is what you see clearly on the site (on the mountain and directly in front of it) but that only represents something like 10 percent of the original settlement. Outside of this, there are less-visible ruins that spread far and wide out into the surrounding desert (more about this later). Also, according to our guide, the Valley wasn't a desert at the time. Climatic events have changed it since the time of the Quilmes, he said. It was much more lush and condusive to agriculture at the time.

Toward the end of the tour, he gave a decent exposition on the history of the Quilmes people. If I hadn't done research beforehand or asked him for some literature, I would not have retained the following information (my Spanish just isn't that good). Allow me to nerd out for the next several paragraphs.

With a little imagination, Quilmes looks like something out of a fantasy novel. It's a mountain stronghold, a location chosen for it's easy defendability. In fantasy and in history, these niches are always associated with free people, with rebels. It couldn't be more apt for the history of the Quilmes.

What a coincidence it is that in the century leading up to the Conquest, an empire was already spreading over South America, conquering in the name of civilization. The Incas arrived in the Calchaquí Valley around 1400 AD. Their interaction with the Quilmes was hegemonic but complicated. Many sources portray the Quilmes as having resisted the Incan invasion. Our guide described it as a "cultural invasion," as opposed to one of outright force; the Incas brought changes in architecture and other customs, replaced the local Kakan tongue with Quechua, and set up officials in the valley to collect tribute for the empire.

The fall of that empire to the Spaniards in 1535 freed the Quilmes from the Incan yoke. The Calchaquí Valley was too far outside of Perú for the Spaniards to usurp authority there, further indicating that the Inca's rule had been tenuous.

Statue of resistence leader
Cacique Juan Chalimín
With the exit of the Incas, communities up and down the valley (not just the inhabitants of the ruins) formed a confederation and, for the next 130 years, they successfully resisted the spread of the Spanish Empire into their lands. I imagine that the Quilmes Ruins had to be the seat of leadership in this confederation. This was not a period of continual war but rather of sustained resistance. It was marked by three uprisings against encroachment: in 1562, led by the cacique named Calchaquí; in 1630, led by a cacique named Chelemin or Chalemin; and in 1656, led by "the false Inca" Pedro Borquez.

In 1665, the Spanish subdued the Quilmes. For their resistance, these rebels were punished severely. Most fled in a diaspora. Our guide told us of a single family who managed to hide in hills near the ruins and whose descendents have kept a shred of Quilmes culture alive to this day.

After their fall to the Spaniards, 2,000 Quilmes were marched across the country to a reducción (reservation) outside of Buenos Aires. The majority died along the way, on this Argentine trail of tears, with only a few hundred reaching the end alive. Within a few generations, the Quilmes were merely a memory in the area surrounding the reduccion.



Here the history of the Quilmes takes another sad and fascinating turn. Their historical presence was enough to impart the name Quilmes to a town which, today, stands near the site of the reduccion. At some point, a local beer company branded the name. Once again, white men showed their penchant for keeping the ghosts of AmerIndians at hand, particularly in the form of mass-produced goods. Today Quilmes is the biggest brand of beer in Argentina. It has been for over a century.

Argentina's treatment of Amerindian people was particularly genocidal (the so-called "Wars of Extermination" culminated in an 1880 military campaign to Patagonia whose stated purpose completely of Indians). Like most genocides, this one was followed by widespread, enforced amnesia as to what happened, even in the academy. Imagine: during decades when not even intellectuals wanted to talk about what happened to the Indians, millions sat down every night and shared liter-sized bottles of beer with the name of an exterminated people on the label. A perfect analogy for the legacy of colonialism: endlessly and obliviously drinking the blood of the conquered and exploited.

After our guide finished, we went up the terraces and into the shadow of the mountain, away from the scorching afternoon sun. The restored ruins slowly taper off as you move up past the astronomical observatory, but the higher you go, you still see traces of stone walls everwhere above you. The entire mountain surely must have been covered with these structures (there's nothing keeping you from scaling the whole thing, other than self-regard). Up there I imagined priests and caciques and nobles looking down on the rest of the city. What a bitch it must have been coming home.

There are many trails you can take up to the left and right arms of the mountain. There are way more structures along these ridges than you'd expect from what you can see from the ground. Or course, they are many amazing vantage points. Up there, you are the guard who sees the dust-clouds of Spanish cavalry 20 miles away and rushes to alert the cacique.

The other reason for climbing up the mountain (which surprisingly few visitors do) is that only here can you see the rest of the ruins, the unrestored parts outside the site, faintly visible amid the cactii and the scrub. It lets you appreciate how far out this settlement sprawled.


We ended our day-trip like champs. Sitting on stone walls on the right-hand ridge of the mountain, we opened a bottle of Mistela (wine from Cafayate, a new favorite), complimented by nuts and some leftover empanadas. For an hour we drank the sweet strong wine and watched the mountain's shadow reach out over the valley as the sun set behind us. Listened to donkeys hee-haw at each other from unseen farms. Not a soul came up the ridge to bother us the entire time.

That was probably because the park was about to close. We looked down at the parking lot and saw that it was nearly empty and that there were only a few other people here, walking to their cars. I think the park closes at 7, but if you come by bus, you can't wait that long. The last bus back to Cafayate passes at "cuarto de siete" (does that mean 6:45 or 7:15?). But you have a 5KM walk back to the highway. You'll want to hitch a ride, but if everyone is already gone, and you can't.

We downed the last of the wine and scrambled down the mountain. We found one last couple leaving the park and got a ride back to the highway. They were pretty groovy, an Argentina man and woman, platonic friends, traveling the country together. We got to chattin' and they took us all the way to Cafayate. They agreed that the Quilmes Ruins, this quiet and little-celebrated destination, was a pretty awesome way to spend the day.