Puente del Inca Travel Guide

Once we had finished our alloted time in the spa itself, our group was hustled back across the natural bridge to the area where local wares were being sold. There were quite a number of stalls there, so my wife and our guide Andrea browsed for several minutes, eventually settling on this very nice clay bowl at a cost of A$15 (or US$5). Sue had to cradle this in her arms for the last few segments of our trip, but it made it safely home!

One of the things about a tour, is that your time is tightly controlled - we only spent a total of 45 minutes here. When we first arrived, we happened to be in a cloudy phase of the sun/cloud mixture that had developed by late afternoon. Consequently, I was not happy with my initial photos of the the spa/bridge complex before we were ushered onward. Just when it was time for the shopping, the sun came out, lighting up the sulphurous rocks! I took this as my cue to jog to a few vantage points to get the pictures that I had first wanted! By then, I had lost the ladies in the crowd so I had to console myself with a cold Quilmes beer until we reloaded the bus!

When we pulled into Puente del Inca for our tour of the old spa, we found quite a busy little spot, geared up for tourists. There were a lot of tour busses here, most of them much bigger than ours, and plenty of little booths set up to sell the local wares.

The thing that most caught my eye was this huge Saint Bernard dog and the little boy that was with him. A cute scene, designed to lure the unwary tourist no doubt!

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This view of Puente del Inca was taken looking up the Cuevas River toward the main ridge of the Andes in the distance. The spa here was developed into a luxury resort in 1925 with the construction of a stone hotel, church and hot-springs bathhouse. It could be easily reached by rail, since a track from Mendoza to Chile had been constructed in the early part of the century. What the hotel looked like is shown in my 2nd photo, a 1926 postcard that a reader of this page sent me (his grandfather had brought it back with him to London many years ago after visiting here). With the shapes of the distant background slopes and mountains, as well as the Cuevas River snaking past in the bottom right, the postcard shot was taken from a position almost identical to that of this 1st photo.

As we could see from the windows of our mini-bus during our climb up into these mountains, all man-made roads, railroads and buildings are totally dwarfed by the immensity of the mountains rising steeply on both sides of the river. There were numerous places where evidence remained of landslides that had cascaded down into the bottom of the valley.

That is exactly what happened to the resort in 1965. An avalanche thundered down the mountain, obliterating the hotel and leaving only a few stone remnants in the upper middle part of the photo, somewhere in front of where the stand of green trees is visible. Fortunately, the guests and workers had been evacuated into the small church still visible directly above the now abandoned spa. The Argentinians consider it a miracle that the avalanche spared those sheltering in the tiny building.

The incas bridge, is a natural formation. And the building you see in the photo were the old thermal baths under the bridge owned by an ancient hotel that dissapear under the snow.