Many people have an image of Patagonia which only covers its Lake District: a land of mountains crowned in snow and lush valleys woven with crystalline rivers and lakes. It seems this is also what the 153 hardy Welsh coal miners and shepherds had in mind when they left Wales in 1865, in search of a new home where they could practise their traditions in peace.
Unfortunately, what they did not realize is that the vast majority of Patagonia is a desert and they had been sold a story by a government desperate to fill a land in which they were still in the process of massacring its current inhabitants, the luckless Tehuelche people.
The Patagonian Desert
However, after months on a boat and a march where several people died, they could not just turn around and go home. Besides farming a desert in a foreign land in a semi state of war was probably a walk in the park compared to the appalling conditions of the Welsh mines and the constant bullying of the English landlords.
And in time they seem to have made a tremendous success, as an estimated 50,000 of today’s Patagonians are of Welsh descent.
Their cultural center is the small town of Gaiman, a curious place of low houses covered with trimmed ivy and home to several bleak, as they are wont to be, Protestant churches. Everywhere you look you can see the Welsh influence though today Gaiman, ironically for some people so keen to flee the oppressive culture of the English, is famous for its tea houses.
Tea time in Gaiman: escaping the oppressive English culture
