Nothing can be more luxuriant than the vegetation in this province; whilst the plains yield corn and maize, and rice and tobacco, in the greatest abundance, the base and slopes of the mountain ranges in the west are covered with noble trees in every variety, interspersed with innumerable shrubs, and hung with the most beautiful parasitical plants. Extensive groves also of aroma and orange-trees produce a fragrance which adds to the delights of this favoured region. The sugar-cane grows naturally in the low lands, and might be turned to valuable account; the demand for it, however, at present, is not sufficient to induce the country people to attend to it. Not so with the tobacco-plant, which they cultivate and find a ready sale for in all the adjoining provinces. The people are a well-disposed hardy race, proud of their beautiful country, and always ready to take up arms in defence of _La Patria_. It was at Tucuman, in 1816, that a Congress of Deputies from the several provinces solemnly declared their independency and separation from Spain. From 1810 to that period the ruling authorities set up had been avowedly merely provisional, and all their acts had been in the King's name, the people vainly looking forward to the King's restoration for a redress of their grievances. It is useless now to say that if the Spanish government had treated them with kindness and conciliatory measures, they would have found the colonies abounding in the same loyal and affectionate feelings for the mother country of which in other times they had repeatedly given such striking proofs. The King was otherwise advised; and the natural consequence ensued, that the South Americans, who had acquired a knowledge of their own strength and importance, simultaneously with the conviction that they had nothing to hope, and all to fear, from a return to the rule of the mother country, declared themselves the arbiters of their own destinies. PROVINCE OF CATAMARCA. Catamarca, divided from Tucuman by the sierras of Aconquija, is one of those subordinate provinces which, like Rioja, owes its independence rather to its insignificance and secluded situation than to any pretensions which the people can have to govern themselves; properly it should be a dependency of the government of Tucuman, to which the Congress annexed it in 1814. When I applied to the Governor for some general statistical information as to the extent and resources of his province, he fairly confessed his own ignorance and utter inability to answer my queries; much less was it possible to obtain any satisfactory topographical data.