The name is a small act of belonging. Samay Wasi means "rest house" in Quechua, the language of the Andes that the Spanish never fully erased from these provinces. González, who inherited the seventeen-hectare property in 1913, did not simply move in. He kept Treloar's vineyards and orchards, expanded the living quarters, and turned the horse stables into ten bedrooms, one for each of his sons. A man arranges a house around what he loves. González loved his family, his books, and the brown mountains rising behind the courtyard. Set high in the Sierras Pampeanas of La Rioja Province, the finca looks out on exactly the kind of landscape that had shaped him as a boy and would outlive him as a museum.

González was the kind of polymath that an ambitious young nation seems to produce and then half-forget. Born in 1863, he earned a law degree, served as Governor of La Rioja, became a celebrated authority on mining law, and in 1905 founded the University of La Plata, one of Argentina's great institutions. He left behind a staggering bibliography: more than fifty books and over a thousand shorter works. Yet the volume he loved most was not legal or political. In 1903 he published Mis Montañas, My Mountains, an ode to the Talampaya canyons and Andean horizons of his childhood. When the property's museum opened decades later, it took that book's title for its own.

González willed Samay Huasi to the University of La Plata and died in 1923, sixty years old, in Buenos Aires. The university formally took possession in 1941 and gave the house a new purpose that suited its old name. It became the Casa de Descanso para Artistas y Escritores, a retreat where artists and writers could do what González so rarely managed: stop. In 1960 part of the house became a museum named Mis Montañas, displaying the founder's anthropological and geological collections alongside his manuscripts. The stones he gathered, the words he wrote, the mountains he loved, all gathered under one roof at last.

Walk through Samay Huasi today and you also walk into a gallery. The Antonio Alice Pinacotheca takes its name from the Argentine portraitist and history painter who, among many works, painted González in 1917. The gallery hangs canvases from a range of Argentine artists, so that the writer's retreat doubles as a small national collection. There is a quiet logic to it. González spent his life trying to give his country institutions worthy of its ambition, universities and laws and books. It feels right that his rest house ended up holding art, the work of others, kept safe in the place he built to think. The setting completes the effect. The house sits among parras, the trained grapevines Treloar planted and González kept, their leaves filtering the harsh sierra light into something gentler. Stand in the patio and the whole arrangement makes sense: a working vineyard, a museum of stones and manuscripts, a wall of paintings, and the dry mountains beyond. A man spent a lifetime collecting the world, and then arranged for the world to keep coming here to rest.