Cafayate Regional and Archaeological Museum

Rodolfo Bravo

In the colonial-style house, on Colon Street, three blocks from the central square, a shy little sign indicates the existence of a museum. Little information is available on the web and, in fact, we learned about it after dozens of trips to the sun city. It was long years without being aware of its existence. 

One autumn weekend we decided to make a trip to Cafayate to celebrate our anniversary. We arrived in the afternoon. We had a reservation for dinner at Pacha so we took advantage of those hours and decided to see what it was all about.

It was getting dark. After ringing the doorbell a couple of times and waiting for quite a while, almost about to leave we heard slow footsteps coming towards the door. We were attended by Helga, Rodolfo Bravo's widow, who showed us into the first room and turned on the lights. A fabulous collection of archaeological artifacts overwhelmed us, with its walls crammed with traces of the very rich pre-Columbian culture.

The driver & cadet of @tripticity_ was slowly making comments to the until then serious and distant hostess, generating a pleasant chat about ancestral and more recent history, in particular about the famous visits she received from the great intellectuals of Salta: Bernardo Frías, Juan Carlos Dávalos, Augusto Cortazar, Vicente Solá, el Cuchi Leguizamón, Manuel Castilla... Helga was an open book. 

It should be clarified that the museum is a private, family collection. Inside, it is not allowed to take photographs. So there are no records of the visit: only the memory of that intense hour of amazement lived almost by chance.

By the time we crossed into the second great hall -formerly a store for the public- our fascination and genuine interest became evident. We could not believe the beauty of the drawings on the funerary urns, pucos and vessels, in which the representations of snakes and frogs stood out.

Helga told us that her husband founded the museum in Animaná in 1935 and a decade later settled in Cafayate.

Rodolfo Bravo was a self-taught archaeology expert who knew how to travel the area in search of archaeological material. All that he shows was found in a radius of 30 kilometers around and is the largest collection of pre-Columbian objects in the entire north. In fact, they make up the majority of the 2180 items inventoried by the family.

Finally, we visited a large room that exhibits traditional objects from the last two hundred years. The religious pieces, fashion magazines of the "belle epoque", magazines about the Second World War and, of course, items used in the first wine productions of Cafayate stand out.

That room faces Calchaquí Street, so Helga told us -as a final remark- that it is a real and curious contradiction that the regional heritage is located on Calchaquí Street, while the archaeological materials rest on the old Colón Street, now Arnaldo Etchart Street.  

Although the entrance is free, at the end of the tour a contribution can be made to help with the maintenance of this private museum.