The shortest day on the road is also one of the most dramatic. Under two hours of driving separates San Antonio de Arredondo from Nono, but the route climbs from valley floor to nearly 2,200 meters (7,200 feet) and back down again, crossing the full width of the Sierras Grandes through a landscape that has no towns, no fuel, and almost no people — only rock, grassland, and open sky.
El Camino de las Altas Cumbres
The day begins with the road south through Villa Icho Cruz, Mayu Sumaj, and Cuesta Blanca — a string of small riverside villages that mark the last inhabited stretch before the climb. The Río San Antonio runs alongside through native sierra scrub. Beyond Cuesta Blanca the RP 34 begins its ascent in earnest, switchbacking up the eastern face of the Sierras Grandes.
The road was a long time coming. The original crossing of the Pampa de Achala followed an ancient horse trail used by Jesuit missionaries — the same path that Cura Brochero, the gaucho priest who ministered to these mountains by mule, traveled throughout the late 19th century. The modern paved route was not completed until 2019, after more than fifty years of construction that required the removal of 2.1 million cubic meters of rock and over 1,100 tonnes of explosives to cut through a mountain range that had effectively separated the Valle de Punilla from the Valle de Traslasierra for centuries.
As the road climbs, the vegetation thins. Trees give way to shrubs, shrubs to pale grassland, until somewhere above 1,600 meters the landscape opens entirely onto the Pampa de Achala — a vast elevated plateau of decomposed granite sitting at an average of 2,000 meters (6,560 feet), roughly 65 kilometers north to south. This is the hydrological heart of Córdoba province: the porous granite soaks up rain and snowmelt and releases it as the headwaters of dozens of rivers that fan out across the province in every direction, including the Río Nono, the Río San Antonio, and the Río Mina Clavero. The plateau is bounded to the north by the granite massif of Los Gigantes and to the south by Cerro Champaquí, the highest point in Córdoba at 2,882 meters (9,455 feet). Along the ascent there are roadside pull-offs with views back over the Valle de Punilla — the Lago San Roque and Villa Carlos Paz far below, the Sierras Chicas beyond — and condors can appear at any point along the climb, riding the thermals that rise from the quebradas on both sides of the road.