Mexico, Central & South America > Argentina > Patagonia > Río Gallegos > Articles > Welsh Patagonia

Bronwen is balancing a plate full of Welsh cakes in one hand, and a vaporous pot of tea in the other. She approaches my table - red dragon on her white blouse flashing with Celtic pride and asks: “Can I put you some milk for tea?” with a deep Spanish inflection.

The Casa de te Gales in Gaiman, is in deepest Patagonia. Bronwen Lopez and her fellow waitresses - Dolores Jones and Claudia Williams – are great-great granddaughters of the pioneers of the Mimosa; a brig which crossed the Atlantic in 1865 carrying one-hundred and-fifty Welsh settlers to their new home in the Argentine.

Gaiman is a drowsy town near the Atlantic coast. Its dusty streets are a hotchpotch of flinty Welsh cottages, hacienda style houses, glow-white Jesuit churches, stern looking chapels and enough tea shops to quench the crowd at the Millennium Stadium. Gaiman bears its Celtic roots with pride: Welsh teachers opened Patagonia’s first ever secondary school on Avenieda Jones and, when the steam trains stopped puffing in from Buenos Aires, the yellow-brick railway station was converted to a museum of Welsh history.

Tagai Roberts runs the museum. She is the graceful elder stateswoman of Celtic Patagonia; her great aunt was born during the Mimosa’s voyage and her great grandfather was the first Welshman to set foot in South America. “When the Argentine government offered us a place to live, he came over to survey the land,” she explains, in English tinged with a valleys lilt. “He went home and convinced people to sell up and set sail to the new world.”

The settlers exchanged hills and valleys for a desert steppe sucked dry by south Atlantic winds. Their first years in the new world were tragi-comic. Unaware of the different seasons in the southern hemisphere, they sowed crops in autumn instead of spring. They were only saved from starvation by native Tehuelches who exchanged meat and pelts for bread and butter and taught the European teenagers how to hunt llama, rhea and deer.

“The crops would have continued to fail, had it not been for Rachel Jones”, says Tagai. “Rachel was one of many pioneering Welsh women whose fortitude was the cornerstone of the colony. She had an idea to use the river Chubut to feed irrigation canals. It was a great success and the next year the valley was a blanket of yellow wheat. The colony began to thrive and they started to build houses, chapels and schools”

Harold Rollit, a ruddy-faced ex sheep farmer, took me on a driving tour of Chubut’s chapels. As his car kicks up a dust storm along the grit road, he points out Mary’s Mountain. “It gets it’s name from Mary Humphries,” he explains. “A midwife who delivered so many babies safely they named a mountain after her. When my mother went into labour the doctor said ‘we have a problem, call Mary’. The birth went smoothly, and my father paid her in cigarettes. She was 85, never asked for money, but smoked like a chimney”.

The Salem chapel outside Gaiman is testimony to the thrifty faith of the pioneers. Built from corrugated iron shipped over from the old-country, it still bears the manufacturers’ stamp: ‘Emu brand, Wolverhampton’. Inside a leather-bound bible on a wooden lectern stands next to a wood stove.

The congregations are dwindling now as the younger generation of ‘galensos’ marry into the Argentine population. “Wales is a far away country, hard to visit,” says Harold. “Very few of us speak Welsh, but the elders are trying hard to keep up the traditions”. On cue, an announcement crackles onto the car radio in Welsh. “The winner the youth Eisteddfod will be presented with her prize at Sion Chapel next Sunday. Please come, as the new Welsh teacher from University of Bangor wants to meet you”.

We drive the grit road to Peninsula Valdez. This embryo-shaped plateau is attached to the mother continent by an isthmus. Valdez is still divided into sheep farms – the same plots which the Welsh pioneers drew lots for when Argentina gave them the land. But the peninsula is best known for its fantastic marine wildlife – including penguins, killer whales and seals.

“My dad would bring the family here during the summer,” says Harold. We would sit on the beach with the elephant seals around us, fishing for hours. In the evening we visited the farms”. Nowadays tourists watch the marine life from discreet viewing points, but Rincon Chico - a working sheep farm - has private beaches where you can get up close with seals.

An encounter with an elephant seal is heavyweight and odorous. Creeping towards the sixteen foot, four-ton leviathan, I was a fly to be wafted – dismissed with a casual swat of a flipper. But the bull had no time for tiresome tourists. After bloating themselves on squid and fish, the colony comes ashore to moult and digest gutfuls of food. As I got within smelling distance, what I imagined to be grunts turned out to be tumultuous belches and flatulence.

As we head back to Gaiman, Harold shows me a picture of his wife. “She’s a symbol of Chubut,” he says. “Born in Patagonia, her ancestors are Welsh, but somehow Tehuelche blood got in there. She’s a Spanish speaking Indian galensos, and one day she would like to visit Wales”.

Articles

• More from Marc Zakian