The Cafayates were a people of the Diaguita-Calchaquí, who with the related Tolombón inhabited these valleys long before Spanish ships reached the Americas. They spoke a language called Cacán, and like other Diaguita peoples they had only recently come under Inca influence after a long resistance of their own. When the conquistadors arrived, the Cafayates fought them fiercely, part of the century-long struggle that defined this entire region. The Spanish town came much later: it was founded in 1840 by Manuel Fernando de Aramburu at the site of an earlier mission, and in 1863 became the capital of its own department. The colonial street grid and adobe architecture you walk today rest on far older ground, where a culture that named the land in Cacán made its stand.

Cafayate is the beating heart of high-altitude wine country, and its signature is Torrontés, an aromatic white grape that found in these valleys a home like nowhere else. Torrontés is a New World creation, a cross of an old Mission grape with Muscat of Alexandria, and in the dry, sun-soaked air of Cafayate it produces wines of startling perfume, all peach, apricot, and white flowers, with a crispness the altitude keeps sharp. The valleys receive less than 250 millimeters of rain a year, and the low humidity and cool nights spare the vines disease while letting the fruit ripen slowly under fierce sun. Most of the wine cellars around town welcome visitors with free guided tours, an easy intimacy that has helped make Cafayate one of Argentina's most beloved wine destinations.

The road into Cafayate is half the experience. National Route 68 runs 183 paved kilometers from the city of Salta, threading the Quebrada de las Conchas, where reddish sandstone has been eroded into forms that seem deliberate. The most famous is the Amphitheater, a vast natural hollow whose curved walls catch and hold sound, and the Garganta del Diablo, the Devil's Throat, a deep cleft in the rock. Seven kilometers from town lie Los Médanos, dunes of fine pale sand. To the north, the unpaved stretch of Route 40 climbs 165 kilometers toward Cachi, a rougher road best avoided in the rainy season but unforgettable for the way it threads the heart of the valleys, past villages like Molinos and the ranch country beyond.

For all its surrounding drama, the town itself is the quiet draw. Cafayate keeps a laid-back rhythm, its colonial-style plaza ringed by low buildings, its wine cellars open and its tables unhurried. Llamas graze in the surrounding country; vineyards run right up to the base of the mountains, sometimes just blocks from the central streets. Travelers come for the Torrontés and stay for the pace, the sense that here, in the dry bright air of the high valleys, there is no particular reason to rush. Whatever Cafayate's contested name truly means, the experience of the place resolves the question on its own terms. It feels, unmistakably, like a kind of wealth, measured in sunlight, stillness, and the perfume rising from a glass.