San Antonio de Los Cobres

We descended on the winding road down on the other side of the Abra de Acay pass. There was still some snow at the sides of the road. After a few kms, the road evens out into a flat plain again but this is not the lowlands like from before the pass. These were highland of the altiplano and despite the flat land, it was more than 3500 mts above sea level. We reached the town of San Antonio de Los Cobres by 6:45 pm. It seemed like a big enough town in the altiplano and even had a train station. There was even a huge dish antenna here and we could see quite some movement of trucks and commercial vehicles here. There was even a petrol pump where we refueled. But, we couldn't really figure out why this town was so populated. We didn't see any industry or agriculture or anything special around this region. It really was a well populated small town in the middle of nowhere with no major cities anywhere nearby for hundreds of kilometers.
We had our dinner at one of the restaurants in the town and then continued further to reach as close to the border as possible. We had found a place just off the Ruta 37 at the starting of the provincial road 70 which was marked as a 'wall with camping' on Maps.me so we decided to go there and see if we could camp. We reached there quite late in the night and dound some half broken walls but it was quite less windy and cold here despite the altitude so we parked our van and decided to sleep there.Read more