I grew up in a bilingual household, speaking both English and Welsh and I’m very proud of my Welsh heritage, but I never realised, until I started working for Swoop Patagonia, that the connection my family home in north Wales had with Patagonia. It is a hidden history that I wasn’t taught at schools – even my grandmother hadn’t heard the story. But 160 years ago, a family from the village next to mine left Wales to cross the Atlantic Ocean in search of a better life, and had ended up as pioneers in the first Welsh community in Patagonia.
Out on the remote steppe of southeastern Argentina there’s a Welsh community that still proudly holds on to its language and traditions. As soon as I learned about this history and connection to my home, I knew that I had to go.
How the Welsh came to Patagonia
The Welsh Patagonia that I visited is very different from the Patagonian landscape most travellers have in their minds. Instead of the sharp ridge of the Andes Mountains – where the world goes to hike in national parks like Torres del Paine or Los Glaciares – this is the wide empty steppe of eastern Patagonia on Argentina’s Atlantic coast. People come here to watch wildlife in Peninsula Valdes because it’s one of the best places in the world to see Southern Right Whales, but when they pass through the airports at Trelew or Puerto Madryn, most are unaware that these places owe their names and very existence to the Welsh.
Just how that came to be is a story of survival. While I grew up speaking Welsh at home, if I’d been born two centuries earlier that would have been completely forbidden. Wales was conquered by England, and its new rulers believed that Wales would never achieve much until it ditched its language in favour of English. Welsh was completely forbidden in public and children would be punished in school for even uttering a few words.
The middle of the 19th century was a time of great migrations. While lots of Irish people crossed the Atlantic after the Great Famine, and Scots did the same after the Highland Clearances, some Welsh people also started to look for better lives across the sea.
Some followed the Gold Rush to California (the Welsh have always been famous miners) and others headed to Brazil, but for two pioneers called Lewis Jones and Thomas Love Jones Parry, the newly opened territory of Patagonia was the place to go. Here, the wide open land was perfectly suited for wheat and sheep.
An Emigration Society was formed, and on 28 July 1865, the ship Mimosa landed on the Patagonian coast, carrying just over 150 Welsh men, women and children who would be free to build a community shaped around their own culture and language. Among them were the Davies family from the village of Llandrillo – just a short drive from my parents’ house today.
Like so many attempts by Europeans to colonise the Americas, the Welsh initially found the going tough. They arrived in winter with no chance to plant crops, and many of their sheep escaped into the steppe. They only survived their first years thanks to the help of the indigenous Tehuelche people who gave them food and taught them to hunt. But the community persisted and slowly put down their markers. The spot where they landed became the settlement of Rawson, and along a green valley that stretched inland (we Welsh love our green, green valleys) was the town of Gaiman. Along the coast was Porth Madryn, named for the place where Lewis Jones had grown up in Wales, which eventually became known as Puerto Madryn.
In the central triangle between them was the settlement of Trelew, another place with a venerable Welsh name, which literally translates as Lewis’s Town. It was here that I began my first trip to Welsh Patagonia in 2023.
Living heritage
Despite its name, my first impressions of Trelew were definitely not very Welsh. The road from the airport passes a life-sized statue of Patagotitan, the largest dinosaur in the world, discovered near here about 20 years ago. But as I drove to Gaiman, I was delighted to see that the town’s Welsh heritage was very clearly on display.
All the signs in the town were in Welsh as well as Spanish, and there were Welsh tea shops that sold traditional bara brith, a beloved Welsh fruit loaf. There also seemed to be Welsh dragons everywhere – and I saw even more when I headed inland to the old Welsh mill town of Trevelin, where one sat on top of the local tourist office.
But what I couldn’t hear was any Welsh being spoken. In everyday life, Spanish was the norm, though I soon discovered that plenty of locals speak Welsh at home. I’d arranged to stay with a local Welsh teacher, who was here as part of an exchange programme with the British Council, which sends two teachers from Wales every year to the town, where they teach Welsh as a second language.
I’d been invited to spend the day at the school, sitting in on a lesson with some of the younger children who were learning Welsh vocabulary. In the afternoon, I got to see some of the results of this early education, where teenagers were given lessons entirely in Welsh. It was a slightly mindbending experience: the class were also being taught English in parallel, so the chatter in the class would bounce around in English, Welsh and Spanish.
But it was a delight to speak Welsh with the children. Before I arrived I’d worried that I wouldn’t be understood, and that the Welsh they spoke had somehow been frozen in time after nearly two centuries in Patagonia. I needn’t have worried; the cultural exchange programme meant that the community here was probably more connected than it had ever been to its ancestral homeland.
Gaiman is incredibly verdant, thanks to the irrigation canals that the first Welsh settlers built. Shiploads of more Welsh people arrived over the following decades, until the last migration in 1920, when there were about 5,000 Welsh Patagonians. Over the next century, there were plenty of chances for the community to blend with other Argentinians, as I discovered due to the preponderance of names like Jose Llewellyn, Williams and Jones.
Those Joneses and Llewellyn’s also get to compete in the annual Eisteddfod, held in both Gaiman and Trelew. This celebration of Welsh culture is a big deal back home, and is a tradition that dates back centuries to when bards would compete for the honour of being the best poet and musician for royal patronage. It certainly wasn’t something I expected to find in Argentina – and looking at the posters, with their photos of children dressed up in Welsh costume – I made a note to try to come back another year for the festival.
Connection with home
With its one-storey buildings and a heritage trail that included the first Welsh house in Patagonia, Gaiman was a charming little town. It also wasn’t shy at selling its tradition to local Argentinian tourists, with shops selling Welsh love spoons and tea towels printed with pictures of Welsh castles. It took me by surprise for a moment – they were exactly the sort of thing I would expect to see for sale in a tourist shop anywhere in Wales.
But it was a nice reminder that the world is a lot smaller than you think. I travelled halfway around the world to find a taste of home. At the end of my trip, while I was queuing to check in at the airport in Buenos Aires, I heard two people behind me speaking Welsh. It seemed like the strangest coincidence, and when I turned around and spoke to them in Welsh as well, I discovered that they had also recently been in Gaiman – and that one of them knew my aunt back home in Anglesey!
When the first Welsh colonists sailed across the ocean to Patagonia, they knew that none of them would ever see their homeland again. But many generations later, here we were – a group of Welsh women chatting in our mother tongue after a pilgrimage to this distant green valley. A connection made in the most unexpected of places, but one that made the world feel a little smaller, for the better.
