Hill of Seven Colours
Purmamarca
An adobe village in north-west Argentina at the foot of a hill striped in red, green, violet and yellow.
Why Purmamarca is hill red
Purmamarca is a village in the province of Jujuy, in the far north-west of Argentina, at over 2,300 metres. Behind it rises the Cerro de los Siete Colores, the Hill of Seven Colours. Its slopes are banded in pink, red, green, grey, violet, brown and yellow. Each band is a layer of rock laid down at a different time, in sea, lake or river, and coloured by its minerals. The village itself is low and brown, built of adobe around a white church of the 17th century. In the square, stalls sell woven blankets and ponchos in strong stripes. The valley it belongs to, the Quebrada de Humahuaca, was an Inca route and became a World Heritage Site in 2003.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Colours tied to Purmamarca
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Purmamarca" on Wikipedia. If you know Purmamarca and we have it wrong, tell us.
More colour cities
All colour cities
🇦🇷 Caminito, the painted alleyLa BocaA dockside quarter of Buenos Aires where houses of wood and corrugated iron are painted in blocks of colour.
🇮🇳 The open-air gallery of RajasthanShekhawatiMerchant mansions in the towns of north Rajasthan are covered inside and out with painted murals.
🇮🇳 Land of mirror work and white desertKutchEmbroidery, tie-dye and block print in deep red and indigo, set against the white salt of the Rann.
🇮🇳 The silk cityKanchipuramA temple town in Tamil Nadu whose heavy silk saris pair strong body colours with contrasting gold borders.
🇮🇳 Red earth and a golden sphereAurovilleAn experimental township on red earth near Pondicherry, centred on the golden globe of the Matrimandir.
🇮🇳 Akbar's red sandstone cityFatehpur SikriA Mughal capital built in one red stone in the 1570s and left by the court only a few years later.Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Shekhawati In: Digrajsingh, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kutch In: Zeel Satyendra Modi, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kanchipuram In: Ssriram mt, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Auroville In: Kaspar Konrad, Public domain, source
- Fatehpur Sikri In: HibaSiddiqui, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- La Boca Ar: Bleff, CC BY-SA 3.0, source