Yukkuman

San Miguel de Tucumán stands at the foot of the Sierra de San Javier, where the mountains give way to the eastern plains. Its position made it a meeting point for routes between the Andean provinces and the Chaco. Founded by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the city grew amid conflict with the indigenous peoples of the surrounding valleys.

Diego de Villarroel established San Miguel at Ibatín in 1565. After years of flooding, disease and warfare, the settlement moved in 1685 to La Toma, its later site. Merchants with ties to the cattle trade favoured the move, and plots for the new town and its church were laid out at La Toma. The colonial town depended on indigenous labour, including people forcibly removed from the Calchaquí valleys after prolonged resistance to Spanish rule. Livestock bound for Upper Peru also connected the city with regional markets. Epidemics and the disruption of indigenous communities brought a sharp decline in their population during the colonial centuries.

During the wars of independence, Manuel Belgrano defeated a royalist army near Tucumán in 1812. Four years later delegates gathered in the city for the Congress of Tucumán. On 9 July 1816 they declared the independence of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. The congress remained in the city until its transfer to Buenos Aires, leaving San Miguel associated with a decisive moment in the break with Spanish rule.