Y Wladfa
On 28 July 1865, around 150 Welsh emigrants reached Patagonia after travelling across the Atlantic Ocean on the Mimosa tea-clipper. Their goal was to set up a new settlement, Y Wladfa, and preserve the use of the Welsh language in this remote corner of South America.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Welsh culture was perceived to be under threat. One of the most famous examples of this was the Welsh Not, where schoolchildren caught speaking Welsh would be forced to wear a wooden block around their neck. Seeking the opportunity for their language, culture and non-conformist faith to flourish, there was a wave of emigration, predominantly to America. Alongside this, a small band of hardy adventurers set out to create a little slice of Wales in Latin America.
In 1862, a publisher called Lewis Jones was accompanied by the politician Sir Love Parry-Jones on a trip to Patagonia’s Chubut Valley, where they’d be offered the opportunity to establish a settlement by an Argentinian minister. A pamphlet written and distributed back home persuaded a hardy crew of emigrants to leave their country behind and create a small corner of Wales in Patagonia.
Two months after leaving Liverpool on the tea-clipper, the emigrants arrived in Patagonia to be greeted by the depths of midwinter. The promised idyll turned out to be wide of the mark, with a prolonged drought leaving the soil in the Chubut Valley very dry and arid. Flash floods arrived soon after, destroying one of the early settlements.
Despite the early struggles for survival, the digging of canals for irrigation helped create the conditions for farming. By the end of the century, the land would support bountiful wheat crops. Alongside this, the native Tuhuelche people helped the emigrants by teaching them to hunt and also bartering guanaco meat for Welsh bread.
These improvements in living conditions led to the establishment of several settlements, many of which survive to this day. Puerto Madryn, named after the home estate of Sir Love Parry-Jones, is now home to around 100,000 people and has become a popular spot with tourists for whale watching. There are bilingual Welsh and Spanish schools across the region, alongside around 50 Welsh Protestant chapels.
Today, there are fluent Welsh speakers in this corner of Patagonia who have never set foot in Wales, a sign that the vision of the original emigrants back in the 1860s has been realised. The Welsh Language Project, established in 1997, continues to promote the use of the language and you’ll find Welsh tearooms dotted around the region. Despite far greater numbers of Welsh people emigrating to North America and Australia, there is no other part of the world that feels quite as similar to the motherland as Y Wladfa.