San Juan is the wine city nobody outside Argentina has heard of, which is odd, because the province is the country's second-largest producer after Mendoza. It sits in an irrigated oasis in the desert north of Mendoza, hotter and drier than its neighbour, and the syrah and bonarda here are the reasons to come.
The city looks newer than its history because it is. The earthquake of January 1944 destroyed most of it and killed several thousand people, and the city was rebuilt on a wider, more open plan. It is also where Juan Perón met Eva Duarte, at a benefit held in Buenos Aires for the earthquake's victims. San Juan was the birthplace of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the nineteenth-century president and writer, and his house is now a museum.
Most visitors use San Juan as the base for Ischigualasto, the Triassic fossil park four hours to the north-east, and for the Calingasta valley to the west, a high green valley under the Andes with some of the clearest night skies in the country.
It is hot in summer — genuinely hot, and the zonda, a dry wind off the Andes, can raise the temperature further in a matter of hours. Spring and autumn are the times to come.