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La Merced del Alto
Cachi, Argentina
Country Hotel. Imagine Tuscany crossed with Pancho Villa’s Mexico, and you’ll have some sense of the cultural and geographic richness of Cachi, in Argentina’s Andean region, a three-hour drive from the northwestern provincial capital of Salta, where lush mountains, wine country, and dusty desert pueblitos meet. If the area’s charming character isn’t enough to get you there, then La Merced should do the trick. This regal adobe building looks like a centuries-old Spanish Colonial hacienda. Inside the cloistered, whitewashed rooms you’ll find pitch-perfect indigenous design: terra-cotta floors, woven rugs and embroidered wall hangings, hand-hammered silver chandeliers, soaring cane ceilings, and stylishly austere furniture. The result is a refined estate that’s both traditional and irrefutably contemporary.
