One of my favourite Argentine customs is the drinking of maté, a green tea which we offer all guests on tailor-made trips with Poncho Tours.
People have said it tastes like lapsang souchong, or even tobacco: I can’t say I agree, as I like neither of those two products, but I live on maté (I’m drinking it as I write this, natch).
It’s fairly bitter, and is definitely an acquired taste: much like Fernet Branca, mixed with coca cola, which all our Italian guests are educated on!
While the chewing of coca leaves, the subject of one of my earlier blogs, is ideal for dealing with the higher altitudes on our mountain plateau tours, maté is also full of antioxidants, as well as caffeine, theobromine and polyphenols, and according to its advocates it delivers a hefty dopamine kick.
Theobromine is also found in chocolate, and improves endorphins, while polyphenols are said to aid digestion, brain function, and blood sugar levels, as well as protect against blood clots, heart disease, and certain cancers.
Yerba also contains vital minerals like sodium, potassium, manganese and magnesium, and the essential vitamins B1, B2, C and A.
When you arrive on your holiday Argentina, head to the nearest park and you will see people strolling around with a flask under one arm and a maté kit in the other, supping as they go.
Drinking maté is as Argentine as the barbecue, Messi and the blue dollar!
I’ve drunk it throughout Argentina, and even in Chile when filming the miners at San Jose, Atacama, for the documentary Buried Alive/Emergency Mine Rescue. A family of one of the miners, from the southern city of Concepcion, served it with hot milk, and passed it round the tent in the early days of the vigil for the 33 miners trapped half a mile below the earth’s surface.
I take packets back to the UK, and earlier this year sourced it from a Mendocina friend living in Germany.
The social element to maté suffered in the pandemic: before 2020, people would sit around the house, garden or park and pass the maté around: the cebador controlling the flask is responsible for topping up the yerba (the tea itself) until the water is used up or the yerba is lavada (washed out, and lost its flavour), which means the process had to be started again with new tea.
(The maté is also the container, as well as slang in Argentine Spanish for “head”.)
By drinking maté, as with the chewing of coca leaves, you are taking part in a traditional ceremony which dates back to pre-Hispanic times.
The guarani people who originated from the jungle areas around the Parana river (where Argentina borders Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil), consumed what they called caá or ka’ay.
Caá simply means “yerba” which roughly translates from Spanish as “grass”: maté is the tree where the leaves come from: hence “yerba maté”.
These trees grew wild as a weed, and the guarani first toasted the leaves, then ground them up in a mortar and chewed the resulting mix.
They sometimes added river water and drank it from a gourd, often from the pods of the calabaza (a type of pumpkin from which many matés are still made today).
An early 17th century colonial reporter observed: “All the Indians drink it before sunrise, and all the time while they’re working, even without food, just sustaining themselves with yerba, reviving their energy to work again.” (Not surprisingly, considering all those vitamins, minerals and anti-oxidants.)
The guarani shamen (holy men) also used the powder of the yerba in ritual ceremonies, inevitably arousing the suspicion of the Spanish authorities.
In 1616, the governor of Buenos Aires Hernando Arias de Saavedra banned maté, alarmed by contemporary reports that “both Spanish men and women and all the Indians drink this yerba and when they run out of the means to buy it they sell their garments and blankets; when they aren’t drinking it, they faint and say they can’t carry on living.”
Ironically, Saavedra was born in Asuncion, now the capital of Paraguay, and a hotbed of maté and tereré drinking (tereré is yerba mixed with orange squash as a cooling refreshment).
This rather smacks of the furore provoked by the Catholic church over coca, another failed campaign to eliminate a ritual popular with indigenous folk.
Indeed, Saavedra decided yerba maté was the work of the devil: “an abominable, dirty vice”, people were drinking yerba several times a day with great quantities of hot water, making the men “lazy, leading to the total ruin of the land.”
He ordered that “henceforth nobody allow Indians to carry yerba, on pain of being burnt in the public square.” (The yerba, not the people, he wasn’t that bad!).
The practice so intrinsically connected with this corner of South America was later rescued by the Jesuits, so often the source of progressive ideas, working in the missions of northeast Argentina, and southern Brazil and Paraguay.
So much so that yerba maté (scientific name ilex paraguariensis) became known as “yerba del Paraguay” or “yerba de los jesuitas”.
Though it suffered after the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish empire in 1767, in newly independent Argentina half a century later, the development of maté plantations was promoted as a cash crop, and today an estimated 500,000 tonnes per year is produced. Argentina tops the charts with 60%, while Brazil produces 30%, and Paraguay 10%.
The Spanish immigrants, after first frowning on this practice, took it up in droves, perfecting the bombilla (straw) to avoid swallowing the tea leaves.
So, as I always tell Poncho Tours guests on our Argentina tours, when you’re drinking maté you’re participating in a classically criolla tradition: combining the indigenous and immigrant rituals.
- Matemundo is an excellent website in many languages on all things maté-related: based, somewhat bizarrely, in Poland.
- And here you can read (in English) all about Argentine yerba maté.
- In our photo, Poncho Tours guests Thomas & Bettina from Vienna enjoy a maté break on the road from Salta to Cachi and the Valles Calchaquies wine region.
