The tour started in Tucumán with a visit to the Talleres de Tafí Viejo railway workshops, the most important Argentinean maker of steam locomotives, wagons and other railway hardware.
Towards the south of the province, there are thirty or so ingenios , or sugar mills, dotted around the central plain. We visited one of them, the Ingenio San Pablo, which having ceased operations is being repurposed as a study centre. One can still see the factory and some of its outbuildings, the owner's house with its chapel and garden, the hospital and the employees' housing.
In the midst of an early 20th-century English-style park, in San Miguel de Tucumán, we visited Quinta el Bajo, where Tucumán's first sugar ingenio was built.
Heading for the hills to reach the Calchaquí valleys, we had the opportunity to visit remains of pre-Hispanic culture such as the old city of Quilmes . Continuing through the Cafayate valley, in the province of Salta , we found many bodegas and vineyards with long traditions, such as Animaná and Vasija Secreta. We visited El Esteco bodega, a former factory which now houses a wine shop as well as a luxury hotel. Also in Cafayate, we visited a water mill which, like all those to be found in north-western Argentina , was introduced to the Americas by the Spaniards in the early 17th century.
Descending towards the plain via the Quebrada de las Conchas valley, we followed the road parallel with the railway line and visited the station at Alemanía. After this, and before reaching the town of Salta , we saw the old tobacco-drying sheds with their adobe walls.
At the sugar ingenios of San Isidro in Salta and Ledesma in the province of Jujuy we could see not just the old factory architecture, but also the manufacturing processes of sugar and paper respectively. A notable feature at the first of these is the old wooden trapiche , or mill for crushing the sugar cane, and a number of machines which had progressively been replaced by steam-driven equipment as the technology advanced.
Still in Jujuy province, we visited the Quebrada de Humahuaca valley, declared a World Heritage Site in 2003, we enjoyed the wonderful scenery and visited places of cultural interest, particularly the fortified pre-Hispanic site of Pucará de Tilcara.

Our tour also took in a steel works, Altos Hornos Zapla, close to the provincial capital, where we enjoyed seeing not only the functional architecture but also the pouring of molten pig-iron and the moulding of a huge incandescent ingot. The tour ended with a visit to a mining village near Palpalá, where we entered an abandoned mine and enjoyed an Argentinean barbecue at a farewell lunch.