The estate did not begin as anything refined. The Bombal family built it in 1830 as a frontier fort, a defensive bastion on the contested southern edge of Mendoza Province where colonial authority met the open frontier. Domingo Bombal, who served eleven terms as provincial governor between 1863 and 1890, held the property until his death in 1908. Then came the quiet years. The estancia slid into decades of neglect, its thick walls weathering under the Andean sun, until a writer in the family decided the old fort deserved a second life. The book Estancias, The Great Houses and Ranches of Argentina suggests Los Alamos may be the oldest house to survive the 1861 earthquake that devastated Mendoza, a structure that has outlasted both governments and disasters.

In the 1930s, the Argentine writer Susana Bombal restored the property and gave it a second identity entirely. She brought the sophistication of Buenos Aires to the desert, filling the rooms with colonial furniture, original manuscripts and mural paintings. Then she filled them with people. For roughly three decades, bohemian artists made the long journey south, some 230 kilometres from the city of Mendoza, to retreat at Los Alamos, and each visitor left something behind. The walls accumulated the work of Argentina's cultural aristocracy: paintings by Raúl Soldi and Hector Basaldua, the presence of the novelist Manuel Mujica Láinez, and above all the friendship of Jorge Luis Borges, the labyrinth-haunted writer who shared a deep bond with Susana. The result is less a house than a layered museum of twentieth-century Argentine art, assembled by the people who made it.

In 2003, eleven years after Susana sold the estate, the gardens gained their strangest feature. El Laberinto de Borges is a hedge maze of roughly twelve thousand English boxwood shrubs, covering more than six thousand square metres in a rectangle about 95 by 65 metres. It was designed by Randoll Coate, a British diplomat and self-described labyrinthologist who counted Borges among his friends. The maze nods to Borges' famous story The Garden of Forking Paths and to his lifelong obsession with labyrinths. Shaped like an open book, the design hides his name in mirror writing within the paths, and works in the initials of María Kodama, the writer's widow. To walk it is to wander inside a literary idea made out of living wood, the kind of recursive puzzle Borges himself loved to set.

Finca Los Alamos is still in the Bombal family, who now run it as a boutique hotel, which means the rare privilege of sleeping inside the art. A guest can wake beneath murals painted by famous hands, browse manuscripts that ordinary museums would lock behind glass, and step out into a garden where a labyrinth spells out a poet's name in code. The estate sits in the orchard-and-vine country of San Rafael, a region better known to most travelers for its wineries and rivers. But few places anywhere fold so much history into one set of walls: a fort, a governor's seat, an earthquake survivor, and the gathering place of a nation's imagination.