Alta Gracia began as an estancia, a vast colonial ranch. The land was first granted in 1588 to Don Juan Nieto, and it passed to Alonso Nieto de Herrera, who named it for Our Lady of High Grace, before he donated it to the Society of Jesus. Under the Jesuits, Alta Gracia became one of a network of estancias whose farms, mills, and workshops bankrolled the Colegio Máximo in Córdoba, the seed of what is now the National University of Córdoba. The order's surviving compound here, El Tajamar reservoir, El Obraje workshop, and the church, was inscribed in 2000 as part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site known as the Jesuit Block and Estancias of Córdoba.

The beauty of the estancia rested on labor that was not free. The Jesuits drew a hard and telling line: they did not enslave the local Comechingones, whom they sought to convert and whom they paid for their work, but they had no such scruple about the Africans they brought across the Atlantic in chains. Enslaved men and women worked these fields and mills alongside indigenous laborers, and the prosperity that funded a famous university and these graceful colonial buildings was built in part on their bondage. To walk the cool arcades today is to admire real craft and to remember, at the same time, the people whose names the records rarely kept.

When the Guevara family settled in Alta Gracia, they were chasing relief. Ernesto, born with asthma so fierce it shaped his whole childhood, found the dry sierra air easier on his lungs, and he spent roughly eleven years here, from 1932 until 1943, before leaving when the family moved to Córdoba for his secondary schooling. Long before he became a revolutionary whose face would circle the globe, he was a sickly, restless boy reading voraciously and pushing his weak body to keep up with stronger friends. The modest house where the family lived is now a museum, the Casa de Ernesto Che Guevara, where visitors trace the origins of a life that began in illness and ended in legend.

Alta Gracia drew another wounded soul a decade later. The great Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, devastated by the Spanish Civil War and the murder of his friend the poet Federico García Lorca, fled Franco's Spain for Argentina. From late 1942 he lived quietly here in a chalet with his sister, who cared for him, until his death on November 14, 1946. The same dry air that had steadied a young Che eased the final years of an aging master who never went home. His house, too, is a museum now, its rooms still holding his scores, his books, and the small belongings of a man composing in exile.

These two famous houses are only part of what fills Alta Gracia. There is the man-made lake of El Tajamar, the museum of the colonial governor Santiago de Liniers, who lived here briefly in 1810, and the Sierras Hotel, grand enough to have once hosted John F. Kennedy. There is a Lourdes sanctuary modeled on the French original in the Pyrenees and a public clock tower raised for the town's 350th anniversary. Each September 24, the feast day of Our Lady of Merced, the town honors the Virgin whose veneration the estancia's last owner made a condition of the land he gave away, a final thread tying the modern city of forty-odd thousand back to its sacred beginnings.