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Updated: June 8, 2025
Our guide traced it out to us with his finger, and assured us that it traversed a bad portillo, over which the wind sometimes sweeps with such force as to take a loaded mule off his feet, and dash him down the steep sides of the mountain.
"You're right, there," replied Besuguito, "for you ought to see the Portillo de Embajadores and las Penuelas. I tell you. Why, the watchman can't get them to shut their doors at night. He closes them and the neighbours open them again. Because they're almost all denizens of the underworld. And they do give me such frights...."
The granite which composes the magnificent bare pinnacles and the steep western flank of the Portillo chain, is of a brick-red colour, coarsely crystallised, and composed of orthitic or potash feldspar, quartz, and imperfect mica in small quantity, sometimes passing into chlorite. These minerals occasionally assume a laminar or foliated arrangement.
Gillies, can be traced with little interruption for 140 miles southward to the R. Diamante, where it unites with the western ranges: northward, according to this same author, it terminates where the R. Mendoza debouches from the mountains; but a little further north in the eastern part of the Cumbre section, there are, as we shall hereafter see, some mountain-masses of a brick-red porphyry, the last injected amidst many other porphyries, and having so close an analogy with the coarse red granite of the Portillo line, that I am tempted to believe that they belong to the same axis of injection; if so, the Portillo line is at least 200 miles in length.
These outermost small lines of elevation extend in a N.W. by W. and S.E. by S. direction. When on the Pampas and looking southward, and whilst travelling northward, I could see for very many leagues the red granite and dark mica-schist forming the crest and eastern flank of the Portillo line. This great range, according to Dr.
In this part of Chile there are two passes across the Andes to Mendoza: the one most commonly used, namely, that of Aconcagua or Uspallata is situated some way to the north; the other, called the Portillo, is to the south, and nearer, but more lofty and dangerous. We set out for the Portillo pass.
Concluding remarks on the Uspallata range; origin subsequent to that of the main Cordillera; two periods of subsidence; comparison with the Portillo chain. The district between the Cordillera and the Pacific, on a rude average, is from about eighty to one hundred miles in width.
The other main line, namely, that of the Portillo, is of a totally different formation: it consists chiefly of grand bare pinnacles of a red potash-granite, which low down on the western flank are covered by a sandstone, converted by the former heat into a quartz-rock.
Gillies and myself, about twenty miles in width; the lowest part, where the road crosses the river, being 7,500 feet above the sea-level. The river draining the intermediate valley of Tenuyan, passes through the Portillo line.
We carried a good deal of food in case we should be snowed up, as the season was rather late for passing the Portillo. March 19th. We rode during this day to the last, and therefore most elevated, house in the valley. The number of inhabitants became scanty; but wherever water could be brought on the land, it was very fertile.
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