Sierras of Cordoba historical timeline

Córdoba was the intellectual capital of the southern continent long before Buenos Aires mattered, and the sierras were its hinterland.

The Comechingones

The sierras were home to the Comechingon people, farmers who lived in semi-subterranean houses and were described by the Spanish as bearded, which was unusual enough in the Americas to be remarked on repeatedly. They were largely destroyed within a century of contact by disease and the encomienda labour system, though their place names survive everywhere and the eastern range still carries their name.

The Jesuit province

The city was founded in 1573 on the route between Peru and the Atlantic. The Jesuits arrived soon after and in 1613 founded what became the University of Córdoba, the oldest in Argentina, financing it through a network of self-sufficient estancias with their own churches, mills, workshops and enslaved African labour. The whole system — urban block and five rural estancias — is UNESCO-listed as an example of a complete economic and educational enterprise. The order was expelled in 1767.

University and reform

The 1918 University Reform began here: students shut the university down demanding co-governance, open competition for chairs and secular teaching, and won. The movement spread across Latin America and reshaped its universities.

The Graf Spee

After the Battle of the River Plate in December 1939, the German pocket battleship was scuttled off Montevideo and around a thousand of her crew were interned in Argentina. A number settled permanently, several of them in the Calamuchita valley, and they are part of why Villa General Belgrano became the German village it is. The connection is acknowledged locally with more matter-of-factness than one might expect.

The holiday hills

The railway reached the sierras in the 1890s and the valleys filled with hotels, sanatoria for tuberculosis, and then with Argentine families on holiday, which is what they remain.