The Santiago del Estero Airport is located 6 kilometres north of the city, and has regular flights to Buenos Aires and San Miguel de Tucumán.

Santiago del Estero and its surroundings are home to about 100,000 speakers of the local variety of Quechua, making it the southernmost outpost of the language of the Incas.

In 1576, the governor of a province in northern Argentina commissioned the military to search for a huge mass of iron, which he had heard that Natives used for their weapons.

(This term now refers to a protected area situated on the border between the provinces of Chaco and Santiago del Estero, where a group of iron meteorites were found, estimated as having fallen in a Holocene impact event some 4,000–5,000 years ago.

Originally a dry forest area, the abundance of quebracho attracted timber industries of British capital during the 19th century, leading to extensive deforestation; the British-owned Central Argentine Railway reached the city in 1884.

[4] The construction of the nearby Quiroga Dam (on the Río Dulce) in 1950, eased the city's chronic water shortage and spurred the growth of local agriculture, based on cotton and olives.

[5] Juárez, by the 1990s, was readily ordering his opponents' deaths, notably that of former Governor César Iturre in 1996 and of Bishop Gerardo Sueldo in 1998.

[4] The bid failed, however, as President Néstor Kirchner signed an executive order removing Mrs. Juárez from her post in March 2004.

The Juárez couple, in their nineties, subsequently lived under house arrest in the city of Santiago del Estero; the former strongman died in 2010.

The Vicecomodoro Ángel de la Paz Aragonés Airport was built in 1959 and currently has flights to and from Buenos Aires operated by Aerolíneas Argentinas.

The city is notorious for its very hot summer weather: the average high is 34 °C (93.2 °F) and 40 °C (104.0 °F) are attained on a regular basis; the highest temperature on record is 46.5 °C (115.7 °F) on November 1, 2009.

Some important figures related to the history of Santiago del Estero are Colonel Juan Francisco Borges, who led the local battalion of the Army of the North during the Argentine War of Independence (and an ancestor of writer Jorge Luis Borges), the 19th-century painter Felipe Taboada, as well as Francisco René and Mario Roberto Santucho, founders of the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (Workers' Revolutionary Party, PRT) and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People's Revolutionary Army, ERP), the two leading guerrilla organizations during the wave of unrest in the 1970s.

The city is home to numerous important Argentine artists, such as Ramon Gómez Cornet, Carlos Sánchez Gramajo, Alfredo Gogna, Ricardo and Rafael Touriño in visual arts, and Jorge Washington Ábalos, Bernardo Canal Feijóo, Clementina Rosa Quenel, Alberto Tasso, Carlos Virgilio Zurita and Julio Carreras (h) in literature.