Erks, the city that shines beneath Uritorco

For believers, Erks is a city of light beneath Uritorco, inhabited by beings who watch over humanity's evolution and communicate with certain people. The books describing it speak of temples and places from which the cosmos is observed. It is not a place you can visit: it has no entrance, appears on no map, and no exploration has found it.

The name is an acronym: "Encuentro de Remanentes Cósmicos Siderales" (Gathering of Sidereal Cosmic Remnants). It was coined by Ángel Cristo Acoglanis, the man with whom it all begins.

Ángel Cristo Acoglanis was a healer of Greek origin who worked with acupuncture and manual techniques. In the 1980s he began saying he received messages from a master he called Sarumah, and that this contact revealed the existence of Erks beneath the mountain. His followers came to call him Sarumah too.

He held his ceremonies among the rocks of Los Terrones, 14 km from Capilla, and what he received was kept in notebooks his circle knew as the Erks Diaries. In 1989 he was murdered in Buenos Aires. He never explained where it all came from, and that missing explanation is what turned him into legend.

Uritorco's esoteric fame did not begin in the eighties. In 1934, Orfelio Ulises Herrera, an occultist born in Bolívar in 1890 who had travelled Tibet in search of answers, claimed to have found on the mountain the Staff of Command or Simihuinqui: a basalt cylinder attributed to the Comechingón chief Voltán, thousands of years old. Its current whereabouts are a mystery.

Long before that, the mountain was sacred to the Comechingones, who linked it to water and their ceremonies. Its name is read as "male mountain" in their language.

Erks entered esoteric culture through books. The Brazilian mystic Trigueirinho published "Erks, Mundo Interno" in 1989, from documents he said he had received about the city's structure, and followed with other titles. In Argentina, Guillermo Dangel wrote "Todo sobre el cerro Uritorco y la ciudad de Erks", which reconstructs the ceremonies at Los Terrones, the Diaries and the circumstances of Acoglanis's death. In Capilla, the El Sendero esoteric library (free, tel. 03548 481619) is the place to read them.

What made Capilla del Monte famous nationwide was not Erks but a mark. That day, on the slope of Cerro Pajarillo facing Uritorco, an oval patch of scorched grass more than a hundred metres long appeared overnight. It was attributed to a UFO, no explanation ever satisfied everyone, and since that summer Capilla has been Argentina's UFO capital. The mark and Erks merged into one story: the mountain as a doorway.

In Capilla both views coexist without fighting. Some climb Uritorco at night looking for lights; others hear it as a mountain tale. The UFO Information Centre at Juan Cabus 397 has kept the sightings archive since 1998, with free entry. Every February the Alien Festival fills the town with costumes. And the mountain's official guided night climbs are the legal way to be up there after dark: by ordinance you cannot climb on your own after closing.

We are not going to tell you what to believe. We tell you where each thing is.