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Chapels, tea houses and gauchos: The Welsh in Patagonia. |
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Escape to the desert
There, the Welsh immigrants made their dream a reality, and the Chubut valley, painstakingly irrigated by hand labour, became a patchwork of farms, all inhabited by Welsh people, their numbers reinforced as further emigrants arrived.
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They established friendly relations with the local Indians, not killing or enslaving a single one. The only clash was in 1883 when three young Welshmen on a hunting trip were killed by Indians who mistook them for stray members of the Argentine army, then pursuing its ruthless "Conquest of the Desert" extermination policy against the Indians.
The Welsh had no part of such policies, and often acted as advocates for the Indians against the government in Buenos Aires.
They concentrated on building their own utopia: their schools were Welsh, their numerous chapels were Welsh, and Welsh too was the language of their local government, which was the first community in the world to grant women equal voting rights with men. 
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Having outgrown the available land in the valley, they had even founded an offshoot community in the Andes.
It was too good to last. However idealistic the colonists' dream of freedom had been, their community was never realistically going to be allowed autonomy by an expansionist Argentine government intent on consolidating its control of the region.
Words: Grahame Davies
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