Mendoza Old Town Highlights Private Guided Walking Tour

Overview

A private, licensed-guide walking tour of Mendoza's Old Town, past Plaza San Martín, Mercado Central, and Plaza Independencia, with the option to extend to the Basílica San Francisco for a deeper look at the city's colonial architecture.

With a Licensed Private Guide, you'll stroll Mendoza's Old Town uncovering colonial architecture and lively plazas — Plaza San Martín, Mercado Central, and Plaza Independencia on the standard route, with an option to extend to the Basílica San Francisco.

Highlights

• Plaza San Martín & Plaza Independencia Walk past Mendoza's two central historic plazas with your licensed private guide.
• Mercado Central Explore the bustling Mercado Central and soak in the atmosphere of Mendoza's Old Town.
• Optional Basílica San Francisco Extension Extend the tour to see the Basílica San Francisco and more of the city's colonial-era sites.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

A private, licensed-guide walking tour of Mendoza's Old Town, past Plaza San Martín, Mercado Central, and Plaza Independencia, with the option to extend to the Basílica San Francisco for a deeper look at the city's colonial architecture. With a Licensed Private Guide, you'll stroll Mendoza's Old Town uncovering colonial architecture and lively plazas — Plaza San Martín, Mercado Central, and Plaza Independencia on the standard route, with an option to extend to the Basílica San Francisco.

On the night of March 20, 1861, a major earthquake struck Mendoza and leveled almost the entire colonial city — estimates of the magnitude put it around 7, and historical casualty figures (which vary by source) commonly range into the thousands. Very little of the original Spanish colonial town survived. What you actually walk through on an Old Town tour of Mendoza today is overwhelmingly the product of what came after the quake, not what came before it.

In the years that followed, provincial authorities brought in French engineer Julio Balloffet to redesign the city almost from scratch. His plan introduced unusually wide avenues and sidewalks for an Argentine city of the period, built around one large central plaza — today's Plaza Independencia — surrounded by four smaller satellite plazas, Plaza San Martin among them, deliberately designed as open, rubble-free refuges in case of another earthquake. That earthquake-driven 19th-century urban plan is the real reason Mendoza's center still feels noticeably more open and tree-lined than most other old Argentine city centers.

The standard route takes in two of those same post-1861 plazas, Plaza San Martin and Plaza Independencia, along with the Mercado Central. The optional extension to the Basilica San Francisco adds a building that is itself a product of the same rebuilding story: it was constructed between 1875 and 1893 in Renaissance style on the site of an earlier Jesuit church destroyed in the earthquake, and it holds a real historical connection to the San Martin family — the remains of his daughter Mercedes, her husband, and their daughter rest in a mausoleum inside.

Your licensed guide uses these stops to trace Mendoza's history forward from that single night in 1861 through to the modern, grid-planned, canal-shaded city center that resulted from it — a genuinely unusual urban story for a South American colonial-era city.