“Tell them to the Mendoza that they rush to cultivate and multiply their vineyards so that the railroad does not take them off. The advice of President Julio Argentino Roca sounds almost unnecessary; Decades ago, Mendoza have chosen viticulture for their land and prepared to make it the flagship industry of their people.
Everything looks brand new in that Mendoza April: The Independence Square with its Central Lake; the hundreds of poplars, acacias and muera planted on the sidewalks; The tram on horseback, inaugurated one day before and that travels Las Heras and San Martín avenues to unite the railway station with the palace where the exhibition “Arts and Industries” will take place, in San Martín and Colón. (1)
And, to dazzle with modernity, At night, access to the palace lights up with electric lamps. The newspaper The wordsupporter of Governor Rufino Ortega, he will say that, if 20 years before “Mendoza was a lot of ruins”, in a short time he has become a “city full of life and movement.” (2)
And it’s true. The new city of Mendoza, raised in the two and a half decades elapsed since the tremendous earthquake of 1861, prepares for enter the era of progress.
The rethinking of the urban network of ditches, the widening of the new streets and the trees, the squares and the buildings have been giving the tonic of the new city, clearly, purely differentiated from the old city, destroyed by the earthquake and that until entering the 1880s remains the “Las Ruinas neighborhood.”
A large delegation
But everything accelerates with a view to April 7, 1885. That day, in two formations of forty cars, Maipú and Paraguay locomotives bring the flame of the Andean Railway to the President of the RepublicJulio Argentino Roca and his extensive delegation.
With the president, more than 300 people come: senior officials, national legislators, members of the foreign diplomatic corps – ordered by the Chilean ambassador, Ambrosio Montt – and military squads for a large parade.
Also Products from the other provinces arrive on that inaugural trip For the great exhibition that the Mendoza government has organized.
The incipient wine industry Mendoza of the nineteenth century benefited from the arrival of the railroad.Faithful to his style, Roca appreciates the reception of Governor Ortega with a speech in which Recognize that the line that opens is the product of three governments: that of Domingo F. Sarmiento, when it was hired; that of Nicolás Avellaneda, when the works began, and theirs, which completes them.
The railroad arrives for Complete the integration of the different regions of the country to the “model” promoted by the leading classes of the eighties. For viticulture it means great access to the national market, with a change of scale that will make it modern agribusiness; And, especially, the possibility for thousands of immigrants to reach the region who will be protagonists of that new era with their work and dedication.
A week after his arrival in Mendoza, Roca will visit San Juan, where the Andino Railroad also arrives And another exhibition awaits it in which fine wines, vermou, cognac, anisado and other products in the region were presented.
Argentine wine begins from the railroad to Transmit the path that will mark the future.
1. Los Andes Diario, Special Supplement “Hundred Years of Mendoza Life. Centenario Diario Los Andes 1882-1982 ”, Mendoza, October 1982, p. 15-16.
2. The Word, April 17, 1885, cited by Ponte, the fragility of memory … cit., P. 362.
