The nickname is more than civic pride. Santiago was the staging ground for the Spanish settlement of central and northern Argentina; the parties that established other cities of the colonial northwest set out from its dusty plaza. For its first decades it was the administrative heart of the region, a frontier capital on the edge of the known map. The honorific that grew around it - Mother of Cities - acknowledges a simple fact of sequence. Everything came after. The city that holds the title has paid for it in obscurity ever since, overshadowed by the younger places it helped bring into being, but it keeps the distinction that none of them can claim: it was here first, and it has never been abandoned.

If Santiago's claim on history is the past, its claim on the present is music. This is the heartland of the chacarera and the zamba, the foot-stamping, guitar-and-drum folk forms that are as close to a national soundtrack as Argentina has. The city has produced a lineage of beloved performers - the Manseros Santiagueños, the Ábalos Brothers, the Dúo Coplanacu - whose recordings carried the sound of the dry interior to the rest of the continent. Many Santiagueños still speak Quichua, a southern dialect of the Andean Quechua, woven through their Spanish; the folklore carries that inheritance too. To hear a chacarera struck up in a Santiago courtyard is to hear something that began here and spread outward, like the city itself.

The city's history runs through some remarkable lives. Colonel Juan Francisco Borges led the local battalion of the Army of the North in the wars of independence - and was an ancestor of the writer Jorge Luis Borges, who would make Argentine letters famous worldwide. Ramón Carrillo, born here in 1906, became a pioneering neurosurgeon and the country's first Minister of Health. And there is Agustina Palacio de Libarona, remembered as La Heroína del Bracho, who in the brutal politics of the nineteenth century followed her imprisoned husband into the wilds of El Bracho to care for him - a story of devotion that the province has never let fade.

In 2021 the city gave its old title a new and literal form: the Estadio Único Madre de Ciudades, a gleaming modern stadium that brought top-flight football and international matches, including fixtures of the 2023 FIFA U-20 World Cup, to a place more often associated with folklore than spectacle. The arena's name is a deliberate echo of the city's identity, a wager that the Mother of Cities still has reach. For a place that has spent centuries being quietly senior to the rest of the country, it was a way of stepping back into the light - the oldest city in Argentina, insisting it is far from finished.