Hernando de Lerma founded Salta on April 16, 1582, and he founded it for a reason rooted in distance. The Spanish crown needed a way station on the brutal road linking Lima, the seat of its South American power, to the young port of Buenos Aires. Salta became that hinge. Mule trains laden with silver and goods rested in the valley before braving the mountains. Decades earlier, in 1536, Diego de Almagro's expedition had already passed through the nearby plains of Chicoana on its march toward Chile, skirmishing with the people who lived there. The valley was a crossroads long before it was a city, a place where empires and travelers were always passing through on their way to somewhere else.

When Argentina fought for independence, Salta sat squarely on the front line. Spanish armies pressed down from Peru in the north, and the man who stopped them was a son of the city. Martín Miguel de Güemes, serving under José de San Martín, led his ragged gaucho cavalry in a guerrilla war that bled the royalists dry between 1816 and 1821. These were not professional soldiers but horsemen of the countryside, fighting on their own terrain. Güemes died of a wound in 1821, and Salta has never forgotten him. His name marks the airport, the streets, and the civic imagination. The war left the city politically broken and financially ruined, a hangover that lingered through much of the nineteenth century.

The city's most extraordinary residents have been dead for more than five hundred years. In 1999, archaeologists working near the 6,739-meter summit of the Llullaillaco volcano found three Inca children, sacrificed and left in the cold so complete that their bodies barely decayed. A girl of about fifteen, known as la Doncella, looks less like a mummy than like someone asleep. Since 2007 the three have rested in the Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña on the main plaza. They are displayed with care and unease in equal measure, and they ask a hard question of every visitor: how to honor the dignity of children who were never asked whether they wished to become offerings to the mountain gods.

Life in Salta still orbits the Plaza 9 de Julio, ringed by a continuous gallery and watched over by the rose-colored Cathedral and the Cabildo, the old colonial town hall. The April Culture Festival fills an entire month with music and craft markets. By night, three blocks of Balcarce Street near the train station erupt into peñas, where folk singers trade coplas late into the cool mountain dark. Salta gave Argentina some of its most beloved folklore groups, Los Chalchaleros and Los Nocheros among them. For a wider view, San Bernardo Hill rises in the east, reachable by cable car, by car, or by a long flight of stairs, and from its summit the whole green valley opens beneath you.