Sierras of Cordoba Culture & Language

The region’s culture is a combination of colonial baroque, folk music and a strong local identity.

Cosquin

The Festival Nacional de Folklore at Cosquin, held every January since 1961, is the most important folk music event in Argentina. Nine nights in an outdoor amphitheatre, with zamba, chacarera and malambo dancing, and a stage that has launched most of the country’s major folk careers — Mercedes Sosa first sang there uninvited in 1965 after a campaign by other musicians to get her on. The town of eighteen thousand takes in many times that number, and a rock festival follows immediately after.

Cuarteto

Born in Córdoba in 1943 and played nowhere else, a fast piano-and-accordion dance rhythm with an unmistakable bouncing bass line. It fills halls of thousands and is a genuinely popular form rather than a heritage one.

Jesuit baroque

The church ceilings built as inverted ship hulls by a Belgian carpenter, the estancia churches, and the carved retables.

Villa General Belgrano

A German-Swiss village whose Oktoberfest is the largest beer festival in South America, founded in part by survivors of the Graf Spee, interned in Argentina in 1939.

The 1918 students

The University Reform that began in Córdoba is still a live part of the city’s identity. Its manifesto — addressed to the free men of South America and announcing that the students were living through an American revolution — is quoted on walls, and the principles it won, of student participation in governance and free secular public university, remain the basis of the Argentine system and a recurring subject of protest whenever they are threatened.

Craft

Weaving and leatherwork in the Traslasierra.

Spanish, in the most distinctive regional accent in Argentina. The cordobes intonation stretches the syllable before the stressed one into a long rising tone, producing a sing-song effect that every Argentine can imitate and does. It is a source of local pride rather than embarrassment.

Comechingon place names are everywhere — Nono, Ongamira, Quilpo, Anisacate — though the language itself is long extinct.

German is still spoken by some older residents in the Calamuchita valley villages, and Italian surnames dominate around Colonia Caroya.

English is spoken in Córdoba city among students and in tourism, and less so in the hill towns.

Useful: hola, gracias, cuanto sale, dale, and culiao, which is a Córdoba intensifier used constantly among friends and which a visitor should recognise but not attempt.