The stripes on the Cerro de los Siete Colores were laid down flat and then stood on end. Six hundred million years of seabed, river mud and desert went into them, and the rise of the Andes tipped the whole pile up. The bands now run diagonally across the hillside above Purmamarca, in northwestern Argentina. Each one is a different age, and the low light of early morning is when they separate most cleanly. The walk that shows the hill best turns its back on the famous face. The Paseo de los Colorados curls in behind it on flat sandy ground, an hour with no vehicles allowed, and the coloured bands drop out of sight until everything around you is one deep red, cut into ridges and hollows.
A scramble onto an outcrop partway round opens the whole circle of the quebrada around you. Three blocks from the plaza a short steep path climbs to El Porito, where you come out with the striped ridge directly behind the village's mud roofs. Purmamarca itself is adobe, at 2,324 metres, and its square carries stalls every day: wool, ceramics, carvings of cardón. Cardón is cactus wood. The candelabra cacti here grow so slowly that a ten-metre plant has stood about 180 years, and cutting a living one is banned, so carvers work only fallen wood. The same timber holds up the roof of the 1648 church on the plaza, raw adobe inside and out. Cusco-school paintings tell the life of Santa Rosa, and the gloom lands on you like a shock after the glare of the street. The village opens its carnival by digging a small devil out of a stone cairn on the hillside, after feeding the stones coca and chicha. For the eight days he is above ground the ordinary rules are suspended; at the end of the week he goes back under. Beside the church stands a carob tree reckoned at more than 650 years, three centuries older than the building it shades, and people still sit under it in the afternoon.