Nono → Mendoza

Nono → Mendoza

Date: Monday, March 8, 2027 · Distance: ~287 mi · Driving time: ~6h 30m (excluding stops) · Open in Google Maps

Road surfaces
Paved · 203 mi · 71%
Asphalt · 72 mi · 25%
Concrete · 5 mi · 2%
Unknown · 3 mi · 1%
Unpaved · 2 mi · 1%
Compacted gravel · 1 mi · 1%

The day crosses three provinces in a single arc — from the wooded sierra valleys of Córdoba, through the sparse plain of San Luis, into the high desert of San Juan, and finally down into the irrigated oasis of Mendoza. It is a day of transition rather than destination, but the landscape changes are genuine and the stops along the way have enough texture to make the driving feel earned.

Leaving the Traslasierra

The day begins at 9 am with the road south from Nono running down the valley floor for roughly forty kilometers to Villa Dolores, where the first fuel stop is. From there the road joins the Ruta Nacional 20 heading west toward San Luis.

Across San Luis

The RN 20 is the main artery linking Córdoba with San Juan and is a long, mostly flat crossing of the pampas. The landscape opens up quickly once the road descends from the sierra edge, becoming drier, flatter, and progressively emptier as it crosses into San Luis province.

Quines arrives mid-morning, a market town of around nine thousand people set in the foothills of the sierras of San Luis where the RN 20 meets the RN 79. The town was documented in Spanish records as early as 1779, though its name appears in a land petition by a Captain Sánchez Chaparro decades earlier — the origin of the name, possibly from a Comechingón cacique, remains disputed. It was struck by an earthquake in 1936 that left a mark on the local memory. Every year since 1985, Quines has hosted the Fiesta Nacional del Mate y los Artesanos de la Madera, a reflection of its ties to the forestry economy — the quebrachos of the surrounding hills have long been processed here. It is a serviceable town for a brief stop: coffee, a walk around the plaza.

From Quines the route continues west through the province of San Luis and into the southern tip of San Juan. The landscape by now is desert proper — low scrub, wide skies, and occasional dust. The second fuel stop is at El Encón, a small settlement of a few hundred people on the RN 20 near the San Juan–Mendoza border, at roughly kilometer 470. The town takes its name, according to local tradition, from a Huarpe cacique who held the territory here. Huarpe communities — among them the Clara Rosa Guaquinchay and the Pinkanta — still inhabit the surrounding desert, raising goats and cattle in the dunes and parched outcrops east of the road. A UNESCO prize-winning weaver named Herenia Moyano brought some recognition to the area in 2001. El Encón is little more than a roadside stop today, but it marks the last point in San Juan before the road crosses into Mendoza.

Lunch: Asunción Lavalle

The route enters Mendoza province and the landscape begins to shift: the irrigation systems that define the province start to appear at the road's edge, and the Andes become a more definite presence to the west. Asunción Lavalle sits about 80 kilometers northeast of the city of Mendoza, in the desert district of Lavalle — a territory that was Huarpe land long before the Spanish arrived, and where the community of Paula Guaquinchay, around 220 people who trace their descent from the cacique of the same name, still lives today. The town has no regular grid; it grew organically in the sand, and the relationship between its handful of houses and the surrounding desert feels entirely unplanned. The main livelihood is artisan work — leather goods, telar weaving, clay pieces — sold from homes that also open their doors to feed passing visitors.

The centerpiece of the village is the Capilla de la Virgen del Tránsito, a small adobe chapel declared a national historic monument in 2017, set on a low sand dune so that it can be seen from across the surrounding flats. The devotion to its Virgin dates to around 1700, when a Huarpe cacique reportedly brought the image from Chile in fulfillment of a vow made during a battle. The chapel's interior has accumulated two centuries of popular ex-votos — flowers in fierce reds, oranges, and fuschias, handmade offerings, and embroidered vestments — layered around the small original image in a way that no official ecclesiastical hand has ever quite managed to regulate. Two mission crosses inside are dated 1883. Every 15 August the whole district stops for the Fiesta de la Asunción, a torchlit procession from the new chapel to the old one, with guitarreadas, horseback riders, and clay-oven cooking through the night.

For lunch, the bodegones of Asunción Lavalle are the thing: empanadas and chivo cooked in a horno de barro, served in family homes with no particular formality.

Arrival: Mendoza

Mendoza sits at roughly 750 meters (2,460 feet) above sea level on a semiarid plain at the foot of the Andes, which are visible from almost everywhere in the city. It was founded in 1561 by Pedro del Castillo, who named it after the then-governor of Chile, García Hurtado de Mendoza. The Spanish settled it because the Huarpes had already done the hard work: the indigenous irrigation system of channels and ditches they had developed to water their corn and potato fields was extensive enough to support a colonial town, and the Spanish expanded it. A devastating earthquake in 1861 destroyed most of the original settlement; the city was rebuilt nearby on a broader street grid with wide boulevards and plazas designed to limit damage in future earthquakes. The plazas remain one of the city's most distinctive features — four satellite squares surround a large central one, Plaza Independencia, and the whole city feels unusually open and green given how arid the surrounding landscape is. The acequias — open irrigation channels that still run along every street, fed by Andean meltwater — keep some 100,000 trees alive and give the boulevards their dense shade.

By the time you arrive in the late afternoon, the light will already be softening over the Andes to the west. The most useful introduction to the city is a walk around Plaza Independencia and its surrounding streets: the Teatro Independencia on the plaza's western edge, built in a French Academy style in the 1920s with Corinthian columns and a neoclassical facade, and the side streets of Sarmiento and Aristides Villanueva where bars and restaurants come to life after dark. The wine country — Luján de Cuyo, Maipú, and the Valle de Uco — is for the days ahead.