Mendoza Province 6.18

The Province of Mendoza is a province of Argentina, located in the western central part of the country in the Cuyo region. It borders to the north with San Juan, the south with La Pampa and Neuquén, the east with San Luis, and to the west with the republic of Chile; the international limit is marked by the Andes mountain range. Its capital city is the homonymous city of Mendoza.Covering an area of 148.827 km², it is the seventh biggest province of Argentina with 5.35% of the country's total area. The population for 2010 is 1,741,610 inhabitants, which makes it the fourth most populated province of the country, or 4.35% of the total national population.HistoryPre-Columbian timesArcheological studies have determined that the first inhabitants in the area date from the Holocene, but there are few remains of those people to know their habits. The earliest sites of human occupation in Mendoza Province, Agua de la Cueva and Gruta del Indio, are 12-13,000 years old. In the basins of the Atuel River, in 300 BC lived a group of people that lived via hunting and the cultivation of maize, pumpkins and beans. Those valleys saw the rise of the Agrelo culture, ancestor of the Huarpes. They were later influenced greatly by the Inca empire during the 15th century. Oral tradition sets the arrival of the Inca Túpac Yupanqui to Coquimbo in 1470.