City (pop., 1999 est.: 457,223), northwestern Argentina.
It lies in the irrigated Lerma valley in the Andes Mountains on a headstream of the Salado River . Founded in 1582 as San Felipe de Lerma, it was the scene of the defeat of the Spanish royal forces in 1813 during the Argentine war of independence. The economy is based on farming, lumbering, stock raising, and mining. Its nearby thermal springs are popular with tourists, and it has grown in importance as a centre of archaeological investigations of pre-Columbian Indian cultures, including the Inca .