Uspallata is a green oasis village at around 1,750 metres on Ruta 7, the road over the Andes from Mendoza to Chile. The valley around it is a wide stretch of bare, many-coloured mountains, and it looked enough like the Himalaya to stand in for Tibet in the 1997 film Seven Years in Tibet, which was filmed here.
It is the last proper town before the border, which makes it the base for the high-mountain road beyond: Puente del Inca, the natural stone bridge crusted in orange mineral deposits; the viewpoint on Aconcagua at the Horcones valley; and Penitentes, a small ski area. Staying in Uspallata rather than making the long round trip from Mendoza in a day gives you the mountains in the morning, before the tour buses.
In the village itself, Las Bóvedas are a group of domed adobe furnaces from the eighteenth century, used for smelting metal from the nearby mines, and now a small museum. The rest of the appeal is the landscape and the quiet: riding, walking, and the drive west towards the border tunnel, with a summer-only dirt road branching up to the Cristo Redentor statue at 3,800 metres.
Ruta 7 closes in winter storms, sometimes for days; check the pass status before relying on it to cross into Chile.