Estación I "Chilecito" - Cablecarril Mina La Mejicana

Chilecito — The Cablecarril

Chilecito is the second city of La Rioja province, a compact town of around 45,000 people in the shadow of the Nevado de Famatina — a peak that rises to 6,250 metres and retains snow year-round, making it the highest mountain range in the world outside the main Andean cordillera. The city's history is inseparable from the mountain above it, and specifically from the gold and copper ore that was extracted from the Mina La Mejicana at 4,600 metres on its flank.

The Estación I "Chilecito" — Cablecarril Mina La Mejicana sits on the northern approach to the city on Ruta 40, and is the starting point of one of the great engineering achievements of early 20th-century South America. Built between 1903 and 1905 and designed by the German firm Adolf Bleichert & Co. of Leipzig, the cablecarril stretched 35 kilometres from this station up the Famatina to the mine at 4,600 metres, climbing 3,500 metres of altitude across nine stations in the process. At its inauguration it was the longest and highest aerial ropeway in the world — a record that may still stand, as similar structures built subsequently at greater altitude have since been dismantled. The entire fabrication was done in Leipzig, shipped to Rosario, and transported by rail to Chilecito before being assembled on the mountain by around 1,600 workers using mules and donkeys to carry materials up the slopes. It operated until 1927, when the departure of the English mining concessionaires after World War I made the economics unworkable.

Station 1 houses a small mining museum — machinery, documentary photographs, and the original cable infrastructure — and the aerial cables can be seen emerging from the station and climbing away toward the invisible upper stations on the Famatina. It is enough to register the scale of the thing. Fuel at the Shell station just down the road before heading north.