Our First Day in the City of Salta, Argentina

May 25th, 2007 | By admin | Category: Travel Journal

I visited Salta nearly 3 years ago and was excited to be back. We caught the overnight bus from San Juan (16 and a half hours) and arrived early in the morning. The city of Salta has it’s own unique character, there are lots of colonial buildings and churches in the city centre, the people are very friendly, and it’s a great base to explore some fascinating nearby Andean towns and villages. To my eyes though the potential of the city has been spoilt by too much traffic, some ugly modern buildings, especially around the pedestrian areas, and lack of planning in the development of the city. This may be a harsh judgement because of course it’s in Argentina and it’s easy to forget they don’t have the same resources as first world countries.

In the afternoon we took the teleferico (cable car) to the top of Cerro San Bernado, a nearby hill, with great views out over the city, and walked back down. At the bottom there was a sign saying we’d just walked down 1070 steps (I was very glad to be walking down not up) and a large monument to Guemes, the founder of the city. The neighbourhood around the monument is one of the best in Salta and there were some amazing houses there.