Cuyo

The desert wine country under the Andes, made productive by irrigation canals dug before the Spanish arrived. Cuyo - Mendoza, San Juan and San Luis - sits in the rain shadow of the highest mountains outside Asia, with under two hundred millimetres of rainfall a year, and everything grown there depends on Andean snowmelt channelled through canals the Huarpe people built and the Spanish extended. The region was governed from Santiago de Chile until 1776, which is why its early ties ran west across the mountains rather than east. San Martin assembled the Army of the Andes at Mendoza between 1814 and 1817, equipping it from local workshops and donations, and crossed passes above four thousand metres to liberate Chile - among the most difficult military crossings ever attempted. Italian and Spanish immigrants brought viticulture, and Mendoza now produces the great majority of Argentine wine, with malbec, a French grape that failed in France, as its signature. An earthquake destroyed Mendoza in 1861. Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas, is in the region. Water allocation is its permanent political question. The region has around three million people, most of them in greater Mendoza. Aconcagua reaches 6,961 metres. Its vineyards sit between 800 and 1,500 metres, among the highest commercial ones anywhere. The zonda, a hot dry wind off the Andes, is a regional hazard. Ischigualasto's badlands hold some of the oldest dinosaur fossils known and are a World Heritage site. San Rafael and the Uco valley are secondary wine areas. Olive oil and stone fruit are also grown under irrigation.

• Existed: 1561 CE – present
• Type: Entity