Los Andes is the last Chilean town before the mountains, a lively market town of nearly sixty thousand people at 820 metres in the green valley of the Aconcagua River, and from here the road climbs steeply towards the Paso de los Libertadores and Argentina. The town is surrounded by orchards and vineyards, with peaches, grapes and avocados growing in the warm, sunny valley, and the snowy peaks of the Andes rise sharply to the east.
The town has a few stories. The poet Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, taught at a girls' school here in the 1910s, and she wrote some of her early poems in Los Andes. Nearby, at Auco, the sanctuary of Santa Teresa de Los Andes honours a young Carmelite nun who died in 1920 and became Chile's first saint, and it draws thousands of pilgrims. The old Transandine Railway, which once climbed over the mountains to Mendoza, started here; it closed in the 1980s, and its rusting tracks and tunnels can still be seen along the road.
The ride to the pass is one of the great roads of South America. Route 60 climbs through the narrowing valley, past old railway bridges and small settlements, and then attacks the mountainside in a series of twenty-nine hairpins, known as Los Caracoles, which zigzag up a steep slope to the ski resort of Portillo and the turquoise Laguna del Inca. The border crossing is at the Cristo Redentor tunnel, at about 3,200 metres, with the customs complex on the Chilean side. Across the border, on the Argentine side, you pass close to Aconcagua, at 6,961 metres the highest mountain outside Asia.
The pass is often closed in winter because of snow, sometimes for days, and even in summer the weather can change quickly, with strong winds and cold temperatures at the top. Trucks are heavy on this route, as it is the main road between Santiago and Mendoza, and they crawl up the hairpins. Border formalities can take time, so bring all your documents and patience.
Los Andes has fuel, food and every service, and it is a good place to fill up and stock up before the climb. Eat a hearty lunch of pastel de choclo or empanadas, and buy some fruit from the market for the road.