Cerro de los Siete Colores
Interesting facts
- Its rocks span late Precambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Cretaceous and Cenozoic times, yet whole eras such as the Jurassic are missing from the stack entirely.
- The bands do not lie in one tidy sequence: faults and angular unconformities have shuffled them, so layers of very different ages sit side by side.
- The green stripes are the oldest, phyllites and slates tinted by copper oxide and estimated at around 600 million years old.
- Some of the pink and red bands, made of iron-rich clays and mudstones, are thought to be only about three to four million years old.
- The name Purmamarca is usually traced to Aymara words for desert and town, often rendered as 'village of the virgin land'.
- A football pitch at the foot of the hill is the home ground of the local club Santa Rosa de Purmamarca, which plays in a league of the Quebrada.
- The village church below the hill has adobe walls and a roof of cardón cactus wood and mud, and keeps 18th-century paintings of the Cusco school.
- A similar striped slope, the Paleta del Pintor or Painter's Palette, rises above the village of Maimará further up the Quebrada de Humahuaca.
Why it is worth it
The Hill of Seven Colours rises directly behind the village of Purmamarca, so close that the last houses seem to lean against it. Its flank is a stack of tilted bands – rust red, pink, mustard yellow, cream, mauve, grey-green and earthy brown – folded and pushed up at an angle, as if a cross-section of the Earth had been left standing in the open air. The colours shift with the light through the day, sharp and saturated in strong sun, softer when cloud or evening shadow crosses the slope.
The colours record a long and restless geological history. Marine sediments laid down when the region lay under the sea, then lake beds and river deposits, were lifted and buckled by the same tectonic forces that raised the Andes, and fossils in the rock bear witness to those changes. The tints come from the minerals: greens from copper-bearing shales, whites from limestone, reds and pinks from iron-rich clays and sandstones, yellows from sulphurous calcareous rock. The oldest bands are said to be hundreds of millions of years old, the youngest only a few million.
Purmamarca itself, at about 2,320 m, is a small village in a side valley of the Quebrada de Humahuaca, the long Andean gorge declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. Its church of Santa Rosa de Lima, built in 1648 and a national historic monument since 1941, faces a plaza that fills each day with stalls of woven ponchos, blankets and pottery. From the village, a short loop trail known as the Paseo de los Colorados circles through the red-rock country around the hill, showing the stripes from several angles.
The hill has become one of the defining images of northern Argentina, and the country even chose it in 2024 as a landscape to be recreated inside a popular online video game. The real thing is quieter: a village of a couple of thousand people, a short trail, and a mountain coloured like a page from a geology textbook.
Getting there
Purmamarca lies about 65 km by road north of San Salvador de Jujuy, on the national route that climbs from the Quebrada de Humahuaca towards the Salinas Grandes and the Jama Pass into Chile. The nearest airport is Gobernador Horacio Guzmán International (JUJ), about 83 km from the hill; buses and tours run from Jujuy and from Salta. The Paseo de los Colorados starts on foot from the village centre.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Cerro de los Siete Colores is one of the hills bordering the Quebrada de Purmamarca which is in turn is a western branch of the Quebrada de Humahuaca up to Cuesta del Lipán, in Jujuy Province, Argentina.
Its unique color range is the product of a complex geological history including marine sediments, lake and river movements elevated with the movement of the tectonic plates. Evidence of this history can be seen in the numerous fossils found at the site.
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