Mendoza was built on a desert. Everything that grows here is the work of man.

The first thing that strikes you when you see Mendoza is how GREEN it is. There are big trees lining both sides of every street. This is a photo of the Paseo Sarmiento, the walking street. It’s a night shot (actually around 1:00 in the morning) so the sky is black instead of a blazing blue.

We arrived in the spring, and Mendoza was already hot. Summer is upon us, and it’s getting hotter. But the streets are cool and shady. No one wears a hat here – that marks you as a tourist. Sitting out on the wide sidewalks for a meal or coffee is comfortable, and walking is a delight.

Here is a more typical daytime photo, not on any particularly interesting or busy street. If you look at the sky, the sun seems to be blazing through the trees. But look at the shadows on the road – it’s cool and comfortable to walk on.  The amazing thing is that every single street is shady.

There are parks everywhere in Mendoza. They are Disneyland verdant, with fountains and artificial lakes. And lots of shade trees.

Mendoza was built on a desert. The area was developed by farmers – mostly immigrants from Spain and Italy – who built on the ancient irrigation canals of the indigenous farmers. The fruit orchards and vineyards that circle the city are fed by this irrigation system.

The original city was flattened in an earthquake in 1861, and the new city was laid out using the same irrigation ditches as the farms surrounding it. The trees in the city are a carefully planned and nurtured crop.

There aren’t any rivers in the area – the current irrigation system taps water from the snow-covered mountains, 100 km away. Once you leave the city, you can see what the ‘natural’ vegetation looks like – scrub and tumbleweeds. There are man-made lakes in the countryside that serve as reservoirs, keeping the spring run-off until it is needed.

Water enters the city from the west (near San Martin Park), the high point. There, the irrigation canals there are wide and deep.

A series of gates allows the municipal workers to redirect the flow down and across both sides of every street in Mendoza. Every single street. On some of the bigger streets, the ditches are under the sidewalks, visible through grating (sometimes you can’t see the water, but you can hear it gurgling). Most streets simply have open ditches like this one.

When we walk to school in the morning, a few ditches will be running with water. When we walk back home after classes, the water will be running in different ditches. That night, they will be different again.

There are some practical problems – you have to be careful jaywalking across the road because you have to jump the ditches on both sides. Even at proper intersections, a misstep will drop you into a gutter – it’s almost happened to us at night.

I have no idea how handicapped people can get around here. Michelle spotted this sign for handicap unloading near a hospital, and thought it was a cruel joke – it’s a long hike to get to a ‘bridge’ at the corner where you could cross to the sidewalk.

If you have a garage or carport, you need to lay a bridge across the river running across the front of your house. You have to be careful when getting out of a parked car on the passenger side. The gutters collect debris – bottles and litter – and municipal workers are continually cleaning them out.

But the result is a ‘forest-city’ – a cool, leafy, lovely oasis of trees in the desert. It’s a miracle.