from the estates along the mountain border. Tobacco is ob- tained from the surrounding fields; brandy is imported from the sugar refineries; wine, rice, and building materials come from outside the district. The basin floor has a wealth of corn- fields to feed the live stock bred in the basin and imported from the Gran Chaco—the grassy plains country of north- eastern Argentina and the region northward. Alfalfa is also produced to support the stock-raising industry. Cattle from the Chaco are turned into the alfalfa meadows and cornfields to be fattened for the journey over the cordillera to the nitrate oficinas or establishments of Chile; the staple product of Salta, now, as for the past three centuries, being live stock, a typical frontier product. Though the Lerma basin floor is intensively cultivated wherever drainage conditions make cul- tivation possible, and though it has thus every appearance of fertility, the soil is much underdeveloped and could be greatly improved by better drainage and better irrigation methods. Only one per cent of the total area of the province is under cul- tivation. I[t is this aspect, as well as the character of the trade and the manner in which it is conducted, that gives Salta a characteristic frontier appearance. As a further mark of its frontier character, there still remains the great fair, which an- nually meets in July and which was held formerly in the town and now is held twenty miles or so to the south at Sumalao.[1]
Mule Trade and Transport
It was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the great fair of Salta won its most substantial reputation. The stock bred in vast numbers on the pampas of the Plata country
PLate 2A (opposite) represents the Rosario de Lerma sheet of the Mapa Geoldégico-Econémico de la Repiblica Argentina, 1919, scale 1:200,000, reduced and simplified. The map shows the character of the eastern border of the moun- tains. Plate 2B is the lower right-hand corner of the upper map enlarged to show drainage, irrigation, and towns in detail. The shaded area represents cultivated land.
- ↑ G. M. Wrigley: Salta, an Early Commercial Center of Argentina, Geogr. Rev., Vol. 2, 1916, pp. 116-133.
