Belén, Catamarca
Belén, Catamarca
Belén, a town of 12,252 inhabitants (2001), is the capital of the department of the same name in the province of Catamarca in Argentina. It was founded in 1607 under orders of Alonso de Ribera—Governor of Tucuman—by Gaspar Doncel, lieutenant governor of La Rioja, as a major Spanish center at the foot of the Sierra de Famatima, in Calchaquí Indian territory. In 1683, after repeated Indian uprisings and natural catastrophes, the regional administrative seat was moved to a safer location on the colonial road between Tucumán and Mendoza and named San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca.
Having lost its administrative significance, Belén was left to providing services to pastoral groups, small mining outposts, and subsistence farmers. In the early twenty-first century the region produces early grapes, corn, tobacco, soybeans, and alfalfa. Whereas the irrigated valleys allow intensive cattle ranching, traditional goat herding has survived in the semiarid foothills of the Sierra. The development of Catamarca into a flourishing agricultural valley has arrested the further growth of Belén, and the whole departmento has been losing population to Santiago del Estero, Tucumán, Mendoza, Córdoba, and Buenos Aires.
See alsoArgentina, Geography; Catamarca.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Morandini, Norma. Catamarca. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991.
CÉsar N. Caviedes