Museo Rocsen
The RP 34 meets the RP 14 at the valley floor between Nono and Mina Clavero. Before turning north toward Nono, a detour five kilometers in the other direction leads to the Museo Rocsen, whose entrance is marked by a facade of 49 hand-carved cement statues — a parade of pacifists and humanists from Confucius to Martin Luther King, sculpted by the museum's founder and arranged in rough chronological order of the evolution of human thought. The museum itself was the life's work of Juan Santiago Bouchon, a Niçoise-born anthropologist who arrived in Argentina in 1950 having fled the Second World War with thirty containers of objects accumulated over a lifetime. He opened the museum in 1969 and worked on it until his death in 2019 at the age of ninety. The result is a polythematic collection of over 60,000 pieces — a Nazca mummy, a 146-kilogram Australian giant oyster, 19th-century carriages, early IBM computers, African scorpions, embroidered vestments, and an exhaustive history of the tocadiscos — arranged across 116 thematic rooms. It opens at 10 am every day of the year. The museum is in the municipality of Nono though its address places it nearer to Mina Clavero; GPS coordinates are the reliable way to find the turnoff.
Arrival: Nono
Nono sits in the floor of the Traslasierra valley at around 900 meters (2,950 feet), hemmed between the Sierras Grandes to the east and the Sierras de Pocho to the west. It is one of the oldest settlements in the valley — founded around 1578, with a handful of 19th-century adobe houses still standing near the central plaza — and has the quiet, slightly worn feel of a place that attracts a certain kind of visitor rather than trying to attract everyone. Painters, sculptors, and craftspeople have settled here over the decades, drawn by the same calm that draws tourists to the valley. The central plaza has a church and the unhurried atmosphere of a pueblo that works on its own schedule.