The great industrial forms of cultivation, the sugar-cane and the vine, gave a new aspect to the scenery of Tucumán and Mendoza at the end of the nineteenth century. The increase of population and wealth which they entailed was so sudden, the economic advance so swift, that the owners of vineyards and the sugar-makers have now lost all recollection of the primitive industries which gave life to colonial Tucumán and Mendoza, and were maintained until the last generation. Nevertheless, if one compares Tucumán or Mendoza with some centre of irrigated tillage in north-west Argentina, one quickly perceives the original features which three centuries of history have given them. The system of land-tenure, water-rights, the distribution of the cultivated zones, and a thousand other features, show that the colonization is old. The exploitation of the soil and utilization of the water have not proceeded on a methodical plan, conceived in advance, which would make each piece of work—the dams and channels of distribution, for instance—subordinate to the whole. The engineers who constructed the great modern dams of Mendoza, San Juan and Sali, had not to create a region of new estates, but merely to improve the water-supply, which was used wastefully by the existing estates. There is nothing more suggestive than the contrast between these stone dams, built according to all the rules of hydraulics, and the network of irregular channels, following the accidental variations of the land and the slope, which preceded them, and to which they have been accommodated as far as possible. In some cases the primitive acequias could not be altered so as to start from the dam. The accumulations of water succeed each other down the slope, held up by a simple barrier of branches and earth which is periodically destroyed by floods. The modern flood-proof dam (dique nivelador), which cuts the torrent in its entire width, and enables them to make use of its whole volume, allows a certain amount of water to pass, for the use of the acequias lower down. This falls back into the broad, stony bed, exposed to evaporation and infiltration as it was before.

Long before the development of the sugar industry on a large scale, there was a typically urban life, added to the common fund of pastoral life, at Tucumán. The neighbouring cantons of the scrub—Trancas, Burruyacu, and Graneros—sent cattle and mules to Peru and Chile, like the other Argentine plains. But Tucumán drew still greater profit from its position as chief stage on the high road to Peru, at the point where the plain passes into the mountain. Primitive Tucumán was an excellent type of high-road village. The road determined its position at the point where the Sali had to be crossed. The first site of the town, near Monteros, was abandoned in the eighteenth century, when the high road to Peru settled in the sub-Andean region and ceased to run through the Calchaqui valley. The road sustained its chief industries, tanning and harness-making for the muleteers of the Andes, and waggon-making for the troperos of the plain. The road and the people travelling along it afforded an outlet for its wheat and flour, and facilitated the export of its tobacco to the coast-provinces. The waggon-owners were really contractors, conveying stuff at their own cost. Moreover, part of Bolivia came to make its purchases at the shops (tiendas) of Tucumán, and the merchants of the town took in exchange Bolivian ore for export. Thus the road built up a nucleus of available capital at Tucumán. This capital was invested, at the close of the nineteenth century, in sugar; and it has increased a hundredfold. Most of the works still belong to old families of the town.

The sugar-region is comparatively small. It covers an area which has exceptional climatic features, owing to the vicinity of Mount Aconcagua. While the higher chains of the Andes further north are separated from the Chaco plain by lower ranges, on which the east winds leave their stores of moisture less freely, Tucumán has on its west the great mass of Aconcagua. It rises, a giant landmark, at the beginning of the plains, from which there is nothing to separate it, and gathers the clouds round it.

THE VALLE OF SANTA MARIA, NORTH-WEST OF MOUNT ACONCAGUA.

At the bottom of the valle one can see the sandy bed of the river as a white line in the foreground. Zone of torrential terraces, which follows the edge of the valle.

Photograph by the Author.

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