Purmamarca is the most photographed village in the Quebrada de Humahuaca, and it earns the attention honestly. It sits at the foot of the Cerro de los Siete Colores, a hill striped in bands of red, ochre, green and violet by layers of mineral-stained sediment laid down over millions of years, and in the low sun of early morning or late afternoon the colours turn almost luminous. It is sixty-five kilometres north of Jujuy, at 2,300 metres.
The village itself is a few blocks of adobe houses around a plaza with a seventeenth-century church, among the oldest standing in the quebrada. Around the plaza, a market sells woven textiles, llama-wool ponchos and silver from the villages higher up. A loop trail of about forty-five minutes runs round the back of the hill and gives angles you cannot get from the square.
Stay the night if you can. The day-trip coaches from Salta arrive mid-morning and leave mid-afternoon, and the village is a different place at dawn and after dark, with the hill lit and the tour groups gone.
Purmamarca is also the turn-off for the road west to the Salinas Grandes salt flat, which climbs through the Cuesta de Lipán to over 4,100 metres in an hour. Go slowly if you have just arrived from sea level. North up the quebrada, Tilcara is twenty-five kilometres away and Humahuaca a further forty.