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? Patagonia: in the footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
This year, the Argentine Welsh will be celebrating again – marking their 150th anniversary, or the sesquicentenario de los galeses (of the Welsh), as the roadside banners in Chubut province have it. The self-governing territory their ancestors envisaged never came to pass. New arrivals from Wales dried up after the First World War, to be succeeded by migrants from southern Europe; assimilation was insisted upon by the Argentine government, and the Welsh became a minority in their new homeland.
They are, however, a prosperous and visible one. Parts of Chubut province may still be a big-sky wilderness of bushes and burnt grass, but there are also chacras (farms) exporting tulips to Amsterdam, plump cherries to Marks & Spencer. The arrival of the Welsh is remembered in the name of a local bus company, its vehicles emblazoned “28 de Julio”. Their history is part of the curriculum: in a converted mill in the village of Dolavon (now an excellent restaurant), I found a coach party of schoolchildren sitting on the floor, clapping along to Lord of the Dance as a slide show was screened of determined-looking settlers and their legacy of chapels.
? Patagonia: South America's far-flung paradise
Congregations may be elderly and dwindling, but the young still sign up for classes in Welsh in those chapels and their adjoining halls.
Puerto Madryn has probably changed more since the Seventies than in the century before. Thanks to the opening of an aluminium plant,cheap jordan shoes, one of the biggest in South America, its population has grown from 7,000 to more than 100,000. Tourists, too, are numerous, at least between the arrival along the coast of the first whale,cheap air jordans, in June, and the departure of the last penguin, in April.
The town – a mad jumble of architectural styles in which rubble-stone towers can be combined with Thirties Streamline Moderne – is built along a semicircular bay. Towards one end stands a statue of a Welsh woman, gazing inwards to the New World. At the other end, on another plinth, a Tehuelche Indian in a loincloth scans the horizon for the Mimosa.
Puerto Madryn has probably changed more since the 1970s than in the century before that (Photo: AP)
Walking between them, I saw the blue sky go rapidly grey, and prepared myself for rain. Instead of being drenched I was blinded, the wind whipping across the pavement and giving a thorough sandblasting to my sunblock-smeared forehead.
If the weather can be this changeable in the summer, I thought, what the hell must it have been like for the Welsh, who arrived in winter? I got some idea in the Museum of Disembarkation, which tells the story of their earliest days. Behind it are caves in which they sought refuge, above a beach stinking of seaweed and swarming with flies.
Towards the end of 1885, pushing towards the Andes, the settlers came upon a fertile area much more reminiscent of their homeland; they called it Cwm Hyfryd, or Pleasant Valley. There they built the towns of Esquel and Trevelin – from which many visitors today strike out into the Parque Nacional Los Alerces, where alerces, or Patagonian cypresses, tower over emerald-green lakes.
Patagonian cypresses tower over lakes in the Los Alerces National Park (Photo: AP)
Trevelin (“Mill-Town”) owes its name to John Daniel Evans, who established the mill, recently turned into an airy, modern museum.
Evans and his horse, Malacara, are the heroes of the Welsh Patagonian epic. He was returning in March 1884 with three other men from a trip into the interior when they were attacked by Mapuche Indians. His companions were killed, but he escaped – thanks, he reported,jordans for cheap, to a leap by Malacara down a steep incline. I heard the story from his granddaughter Clery Evans, in a re-creation of John Daniel’s home in the grounds of her own, yards away from the grave where Malacara is buried.
? Top 10 things to do in Wales this summer
Sitting by the fireplace, its mantel topped with a dragon pennant and a plaque bearing the foreleg of Malacara, I listened as she spoke of those days when the Welsh suffered a hunger that was “espantoso” (horrific), and when they came to regard the Tehuelche not as Indians but as “hermanos del desierto” – brothers in the desert.
Clery Evans has never been to Wales, and told me that a trip now,jordan shoes, a year on from her mother’s death, would be too painful. Alejandro Jones, one of the younger generation of Argentine Welsh, has been three times, but his first visit wasn’t planned.
Jones, a lean, shaven-headed man of 32,http://users.atw.hu/team-axone/index.php?site=forum_topic&topic=14037cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, earns his living as a farmer, but is well known in the region as a singer, composer and performer at eisteddfodau. Spanish is his first tongue. He learnt English at school and Welsh at home, but had no great desire to visit Wales. Modern Welsh culture, he says, seemed so ajeno – alien – to his own.
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He went to work with polo horses in Ascot, Berkshire. It was only when the job didn’t pan out as expected that he rang friends in Llanuwchllyn, near Bala, to see if there might be work there.
He’d found people in Ascot unwelcoming, and didn’t imagine the Welsh in Wales would be much different. “But the first night in the pub: I was immediately a friend of everyone.”
Of his love of music, he says: “We use it to go back to the old times we never lived but somehow learnt to love. When we sing, people sometimes say, 'I don’t understand Welsh, but I really feel what you mean.’?”
The Welsh settlers must have been a forgiving lot: far from shooting Lewis Jones, the man who oversold Patagonia, they immortalised him. “Tre” in Welsh means town, and “Lew” is short for Lewis, so Trelew is Lewis Town or, as the local museum has it in its title, the “Pueblo de Luís”. A granite obelisk on the cobbles in front of the museum, erected in 1965 by the St David Society, marks the “Centenario de la colonización galesa de la Patagonia”.
Another colonisation, which has generated much more heat, is remembered in the adjacent park. Close to a statue of Lewis, I came across a stone inscribed with the names of conscripts from Trelew who fought in 1982 over the Falkland Islands (which Argentines know as Las Malvinas). Among the 90 or so were Mario Alfredo Lloyd and Milton Horacio Rhys.
I took it for a memorial to the dead, but it wasn’t. “Milton’s my brother, and he’s very much alive,” Rogelio Rhys told me later.
The Trochita known as Old Patagonian Express (Photo: Getty)
Rogelio, whose great?grandfather was “the first or second Baptist minister in South America”, combines the jobs of guide and piano tuner, which is how he came to be driving me to the Moriah chapel on the outskirts of Trelew, and then offering to source missing parts for its harmonium.
Cristina Hughes MacDonald, who stepped over bat droppings to unlock the chapel for us, told me she wasn’t a religious person, and had ended up as custodian of Moriah because of family connections. Her great-grandmother on her father’s side came over on the Mimosa, her great-grandmother on her mother’s side on a later ship, and theirs was the first marriage in the chapel. “Sometimes,” she said, “when I’m taking people round and talking about the history of the place, I find myself saying, 'When we arrived…’?”
? Argentina guide
Ten miles from Trelew, Gaiman (Tehuelche for “whetstone”), founded in 1874,Kicksokok.com, is the best preserved of the Welsh settlements, with a handful of museums and a redundant railway tunnel that’s being turned into another exhibition space for this year’s anniversary.
It’s a place of about 6,000 people, where history is passed down in more ways than one. Its original museum was run by Tegai Roberts, great-granddaughter of Lewis Jones. When she died last year, her nephew, Fabio González,http://users.atw.hu/phake-mgaming/index.php?site=forum_topic&topic=15257cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, took over.
He is accustomed to inquiries that begin, “If your name’s González, how come you’re running a museum about the Welsh?” He says modestly that he is qualified neither as a historian nor a museum curator, and that his involvement came about because the authorities in the Nineties wanted to open on a Sunday, and the God-fearing Tegai refused to do so.
He has become renowned as a source of accurate information on the Welsh and their story, a story that’s still being revised. He told me how Jeremy Wood, a writer based in Esquel, had recently unearthed maps made by one Henry Libanus Jones,http://users.atw.hu/team-axone/index.php?site=forum_topic&topic=14036cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg, a Welsh explorer, of Patagonia in the early 1850s. The maps were published by the Royal Geographical Society in London before the Mimosa sailed – but the prospective settlers hadn’t seen them.
Fabio, now in his 50s,cheap real jordans, says he learnt a little Welsh from his mother, but didn’t take classes until he was in his 20s. These days, following a revival that has gathered strength since the centenary of the Mimosa’s arrival, children can start the language in kindergarten. And it’s not just descendants of the Welsh who are keen to take it up.
I was outside a café on Gaiman’s main street, trying to frame a picture of a Welsh and Argentinian flag side by side, when the owner, Germán Dopazo, invited me in. He wasn’t of Welsh descent, he said, but his wife was, and they had a friend who had just taken a role in Wales in a telenovela – a soap opera.
Hotel Libertador is in Trelew, Patagonia - not in Wales
I looked up Pobol y Cwm later. Elizabeth Fernández, their friend, was playing a woman of Welsh descent from Patagonia who arrives in the village of Cwmderi to look into her family’s history. Elizabeth Fernández grew up in Gaiman, felt an affinity for Welsh culture and started learning the language at 15. She’s fluent now – but she doesn’t have a drop of Welsh blood in her veins.
Essentials
Getting there
Airlines flying to Argentina include British Airways (0844 493 0787; ba.com), Iberia (020 3684 3774; iberia.com) and American Airlines (020 7660 2300; aa.com).
When to go
November to March is the southern summer,cheap wholesale jordans, and offers the chance to combine a Welsh cultural tour with watching penguins, elephant seals and sea lions on the coast around Península Valdés.
June to mid-December is the best time for whale watching.
There will be a number of commemorative events taking place in 2015 to mark the Welsh settlement, ranging from concerts and charity treks to rugby matches. For further information, see the websites of the Wales-Argentina Society (cymru-ariannin.com), Welsh in Patagonia (galesesenpatagonia.com.ar) and Andes Patagonia 2015 (patagonia2015.com).
Where to stay
Michael Kerr stayed at the Kenton Palace Hotel in Buenos Aires (0054 11 4331 2020; kentonpalace.com.ar), the Cumbres Blancas Hotel in Esquel (29 4545 5100; cumbresblancas.com.ar), the Hosteria Casa de Piedra in Trevelin (29 4548 0357; casadepiedratrevelin.com), the Hotel Bahia Nueva in Puerto Madryn (28 04451677; bahianueva.com.ar), the Hotel Libertador in Trelew (28 0442 0220; hotellibertadortw.com.ar) and Gwesty Tywi in Gaiman (28 0449 1292; hosteria-gwestytywi.com.ar).
Further reading
See the newly published Gwalia Patagonia by Jon Gower (Gomer Press).
Two books by regular contributors to Telegraph Travel touch on the Welsh in Patagonia: Patagonia: A Cultural History by Chris Moss (Signal Books) and Travels in an Old Tongue by Pamela Petro (Flamingo).
Michael Kerr travelled as a guest of Journey Latin America (020 3432 6096; journeylatinamerica.co.uk), which offers a 12-day trip to Argentina from ?2,471 per person, based on two sharing. The price includes transfers, b&b accommodation, flights and excursions,cheap authentic jordans, including La Trochita train, Península Valdés, Punta Tombo and Gaiman.