Alto Valle

How apples came

Apples grew in northern Patagonia before anyone farmed the Alto Valle. In the Andean valley of the Caleufu, in south-western Neuquén, the chief Sayhueque’s lands were known as the Gobernación de las Manzanas for their wild apple trees, said to have come from Chile with Jesuit missionaries, and the people made a prized alcoholic drink from the fruit³. The English traveller George Chaworth Musters met the Manzaneros of Las Manzanas, “so named from the groves of apple trees”, who brewed “a very tolerable cider”⁹.

The valley where the Limay and Neuquén meet to form the Río Negro was held back by floods, lack of irrigation and distance from markets³. In 1899 the British-owned Ferrocarril Sud, the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway, opened a line of about 670 km from Bahía Blanca to the confluence⁴. Work on a dam across the Neuquén, named after the engineer Rodolfo E. Ballester, began on 1 January 1910⁵; the railway paid just over half the first costs and built the canals that by about 1928 carried water more than 100 km, from Contralmirante Cordero to Chichinales³.

Water brought colonists. The state’s colony of General Roca had been laid out in 1883 in lots of 100 ha called chacras; as irrigation spread, companies broke up big holdings, the railway’s land company selling plots of 2 to 50 ha at Cinco Saltos and an Italian–Argentine company settling families from Italy at Villa Regina from 1924³. Alfalfa came first, but by 1926 the valley’s fruit earned more than its alfalfa³. The railway’s experimental station at Cinco Saltos, opened in 1918, imported varieties, sold grafted trees on credit and urged family farms of up to 10 ha³, and the Ministry of Agriculture’s station at J. J. Gómez, at work since 1913, planted its first collection of 24 apple varieties in 1924⁶.

In 1928 the railway set up a marketing company, Argentine Fruit Distributors, which packed fruit at its stations and before the Second World War sold about 80% of the valley’s crop^3,4. Pears were exported from about 1930 and apples from 1936, when the valley supplied about three-quarters of Argentina’s apple exports^3,4. In 1937 a national fruit conference heard that five hectares of apple trees “allow a family to live comfortably” (translated), and in those years Red Delicious overtook the Williams pear as the most profitable fruit³. The railway and its fruit company were nationalised in 1948³. Between 1955 and 1965 the valley’s apple and pear output rose by 61%, to 438,730 tonnes, all the growth coming from apples⁴.

How they’re grown

The climate is a cold desert’s, with daily swings of more than 15 °C and a January mean of 23.1 °C¹¹. The farms lie on river terraces below the escarpments of the Patagonian plateau¹⁰, which rise about 200 m above the towns¹¹, and rows of poplars shelter the orchards from the wind¹⁰. USDA credits the dry air, the gap between day and night temperatures and the river water for the fruit’s colour and keeping². Spring frost is the great risk: the last frost comes on average between 24 September and 12 October, while the trees flower, and in 1994 about a third of the fruit area had heaters or sprinklers against it¹⁰.

Small growers have dwindled. SENASA counted 2,266 pome- and stone-fruit growers in Río Negro and Neuquén in 2016 and 1,427 in 2025, 1,251 of them with apples¹; USDA reports that large growers, 2.5% of the total, farm 60% of the fruit land². From the 1960s packing and cold-storage firms moved into growing; a crisis that began in the late 1970s deepened in the 1990s, when big packers failed to pay for the 1998/99 harvest, and codling moth in 1999 and 2000 left 30% of the picked fruit rejected³.

Much of the orchard is old: in 2025 only 2,053 ha of apples were under ten years old¹. Dwarfing rootstocks and trellised plantings came in from 1967⁴, and USDA puts the cost of a hectare of new varieties, with hail protection and irrigation that also guards against frost, at about USD 50,000². INTA’s Alto Valle station, formed in 1963 from the J. J. Gómez and Cinco Saltos stations⁶, keeps Argentina’s only pome-fruit germplasm bank, with about 400 apple cultivars⁸.

What’s picked

Río Negro and Neuquén had 16,157 ha of apples in 2025, 13,385 ha and 2,772 ha, against 20,495 ha in 2016; Allen had the most, 2,565 ha¹. Río Negro grows about 82% of Argentina’s apples and pears and Neuquén 15%². Red Delicious covered 10,732 ha, 66.4% of the apple area; Granny Smith had 1,968 ha, Gala 1,772 ha and Cripps Pink 856 ha, with small plots of Fuji and Golden Delicious¹.

Picking may begin only on dates set each season: in 2023/24 it opened in the Alto Valle on 23 January for Gala, 14 February for Red Delicious, 4 March for Granny Smith and 30 March for Cripps Pink⁷; USDA gives Argentina’s apple harvest as February to April². In 2025 SENASA recorded 91,088 t of apples exported from the two provinces, 40,007 t of them to Brazil; 254,324 t went fresh to the Argentine market and 218,364 t to industry¹. USDA puts Argentina’s whole crop at 525,000 t in 2024/25².

On the table

The Alto Valle grows 85–90% of the apples eaten in Argentina⁸, and Red Delicious makes up more than 80% of the apples Argentines eat². About 30% of the crop is not fit to sell fresh and goes to industry, mainly for juice concentrate but also for cider, dried apple and preserves⁸. Most Argentine cider is made from packing-house rejects and drunk at the end-of-year holidays, and since 2018 INTA and small cider-makers have been testing cider varieties such as Broad Eyed Pippin and Sturmer Pippin⁸.

General Roca holds the Fiesta Nacional de la Manzana each February^12,13. Created by provincial law in 1964 and made national in 1966, it was preceded in 1946 by a Fiesta del manzano that began the blessing of the fruits, still part of the festival; the first national festival, in March 1966, was cut short by a flood¹². The 2026 festival, from 20 to 22 February, kept its contests for the heaviest apple and for packers¹³.

In Spanish the fruit is manzana¹⁵, and the family farm a chacra, a word from Quechua¹⁴.

Notes

• By 1929 the railway had 18 stations in the irrigated zone, one every 7 km, where the valley’s towns stand today³.
• By 1964 the small growers’ corporation CORPOFRUT had 4,000 members³.
• The railway across the dam opened on 25 June 1910, years before the dam was finished⁵.

Where the sources disagree

• The dam. Bandieri and Blanco date the dam to 1916 and the irrigation network to about 1928³; the Río Negro government gives the formal opening as 1918 and canal work as lasting until 1931⁵.
• The packing sheds. Bandieri and Blanco have Argentine Fruit Distributors packing from 1928 at five stations, Villa Regina among them³; Vera has four by 1929 and Villa Regina later⁴.
• 1936. The valley’s share of Argentina’s apple exports was 75%³ or 74%⁴.
• Gala. USDA describes Gala as expanding strongly², but SENASA shows its area falling from 2,750 ha in 2016 to 1,772 ha in 2025¹.
• Production. USDA’s 525,000 t for all Argentina in 2024/25² is less than SENASA’s 2025 shipment records for Río Negro and Neuquén alone¹; the two measure different things.
• What counts as the Alto Valle. SENASA’s provincial figures include the Valle Medio and other valleys; no Alto Valle total was found, and General Roca’s apple area, misprinted as “14.08”, is left out¹. The elevation comes from a profile in a climate study¹¹.