Geographical Magazine Editor Carolyn Fry and photographer Alex Benwell travelled to Argentina to visit a new museum that is telling the story of Patagonia's multicultural people
A few treasured possessions were all they could take. One hundred and
fifty three Welsh men, women and children packed up clothes, furniture, books
and letters and boarded the tea clipper Mimosa in Liverpool docks. The
families sought a new life in a place with enough land for everyone and where theirchildren could grow up learning Welsh culture and language, not English. Exactly two months later, after a gruelling Atlantic journey, they arrived on the eastern coast of Argentina. When they disembarked, in the harsh winter chill of 1865, one woman gave birth to a daughter on the beach.
The land at which the settlers arrived was a wild, empty place, where
rugged mountain ranges encircled wide, wind-swept plains. Today, the region is
still sparsely populated; just under two million people live in 673,000
square kilometres, but there is a sense of order to the place. The solid-looking homesteads that dot the plains are bordered by neat rows of upright Lombardy poplar trees, planted to keep out the wind. Distances between settlements are long, but the major roads are well tarmacked.
Although the first settlers faced hunger, hardship and loneliness, their
legacy is a society that has learned to live comfortably with the harsh
terrain.
While some modern Patagonians choose to live in remote villages, many have clustered together in towns on its east coast. A few settlements, such as Trelew and Gaiman, have retained their Welsh characteristics. Red dragons look out from the top of public buildings and the red, white and green
Welsh flag is displayed prominently. In early May and mid-September, Gaiman
still hosts traditional Welsh Eisteddfodd festivals. 'These days the descendents
are spread out rather than living together in communities,' explains
Marcelo
Gavirati, who lives in the town where the Welsh first arrived and speaks
Spanish with more than a hint of a Welsh accent. 'But many have become
interested in tracing their family histories.'
Stories of the lives of the early settlers in Patagonia have now been
carefully pieced together with memorabilia to create a new museum, Museo
Leleque. The collection is housed in two low, white buildings on a wide,
windy plain 1,350 kilometres southwest of Buenos Aires. The museum's
isolated location reflects the solitariness of the lives of the
communities
depicted inside. In five themed rooms and a reconstructed boliche, or
general store, visitors are taken on a journey through Patagonia's past.
It
begins over 12,500 years ago with the earliest natives, takes in
successive waves of immigrants and moves on to present-day life on Argentina's vast
ranches or estancias. 'Children in Argentina learn very little about
Patagonian history,' says Rodolpho Casamiquela, Scientific Director of the museum and President of the Ameghino Foundation. 'But it is important that
people learn about the different cultures that came. The mix of natives
and
pioneers are what have made Patagonia what it is today.'
Cultural melting pot
The names of the people that peer out from faded black and white
photographs
around the museum give away a multitude of backgrounds. There are the
Middle
Eastern Jalil family, the Ap Iwans from Wales, native Indian Francisco
Mahuelquir and, of course, the proud-looking woman in the high-necked
dress,
Maria Elizabeth Humphries, the baby born on the beach all those years ago.
As news spread that Patagonia offered a life free from economic hardship
and
war, Lebanese, Spanish and Italian families arrived. The Welsh farmed the land, while the Arabs set up boliches to trade the goods they produced.
Later, English and Spanish settlers built up and managed the estancias. In the smaller of the museum's two buildings, Leleque's original general store has been recreated as a café for visitors.
On wooden shelves behind
a long bar stand bottles of Russian vodka and Dutch advocaat, while a poster on the wall of two men wrestling declares Guinness to be
fortalece - strength giving. The original boliche would have sold everything from
alcohol to blankets, timber to bread, and would have supplied all the
20-or-so local families.
Among the artefacts housed in the museum are records from the general store's ledger showing that two particularly notorious customers bought
provisions there. Their names are listed as Henry Place and Santiago Ryan but historians now know that these were pseudonyms used by Butch Cassidy
and
the Sundance Kid. The pair went on the run after robbing a bank in Nevada
in
1900 and chose to lie low in Patagonia.
Like many in southern Argentina in the early 20th century, Butch and
Sundance invested their money in a sheep ranch. Sheep had only recently
been introduced from the Falkland Isles and wool was viewed as the new white
gold'. Many entrepreneurs set up ranches at this time, fencing in great
swathes of land with barbed wire and populating the fields with Australian
Merino and Corredale sheep.
Estancia life
Museo Leleque stands within Estancia Leleque, one of five ranches managed
by the Compaa de Tierras Sud Argentino SA (Argentine Southern Land Company)
and owned by clothing company Benetton. Displays in the museum depict how
daily life for the ranch managers and their families revolved around the farming year. At a table in the boliche, a copy of the Pastoral Review and
Graziers Record lies open beside a ledger with neat copperplate notes on the lambs
born that season. One record, dated October 1938, reads Oplain body,
rather
leggie, dense fair fleece, while another declares a lamb to be Owell
trousered. Today, Benetton derives wool for its clothing from the 58,000
sheep which graze its vast 220,000-hectare estate.
The issue of who owns land in Argentina has long been a contentious one.
Those that have fared the worst in the struggle for land rights are the indigenous people who lived in the country before any settlers arrived. In
the main museum, one display is given over to showing the major conflicts between the natives and settlers. Before 1880, much of the land southwest
of
Buenos Aires was considered to be territory of the native Tehuelche
Indians.
Although Spanish, Dutch, French and English explorers came in search of
gold
between 1520 and 1789, no-one succeeded in forming settlements in
Patagonia until the Welsh arrived.
The Welsh settlers generally had a good
relationship with the natives the Indians taught the Welsh survival and
hunting skills but the government was keen to get sovereignty over the land in the south to prevent Chile from claiming it. As a result, between
1878 and 1885 the government fought the bloody War of the Desert with
the
Indians and took from them the land that today makes up Patagonia.
As the ranches sprung up in the early 1900s, the barbed-wire fences that
kept the sheep in also kept the Indians out. With no land and with their
relatives killed in the war, many natives became depressed and turned to
drink. Today, the Indians are still fighting for land to be returned to
them
and for their language and culture to be recognised.
Recent decades, however, have not been kind to estancia owners either.
The past years have seen the boom in sheep and cattle farming collapse.
Hundreds
of farms, struggling to cope with a less and less viable market for wool
or
meat, closed in the 1990s. The eruption of Volcano Hudson in Chile in
1991,
which deposited ash over a wide area of Santa Cruz province and killed
over
one million head of cattle, was the final blow for many and great tracts
of
land became deserted.
Tourism lifeline
Today there are signs that the area is getting back on its feet once more.
Tourism is helping to reinvigorate the area, providing income for both
ranch owners and Indian communities. Provincial authorities have recognised that the area's history, wild countryside and indigenous people can offer
visitors a holiday experience unmatched by any other part of the world.
The fact that Museo Leleque is already welcoming nearly 1,000 visitors a
month,
despite its isolated location, is testament to this. The museum is now
trying to work with other tourism ventures in the area to keep the
momentum going.
One such project is at Nahuel Pan, a blustery settlement not far from from
Leleque. Here, several sturdy wooden huts have been built from railwaysleepers to house a cultural visitor centre. Inside, native families weave
handicrafts, sing folk songs and drink maté, the Argentinian equivalent to
tea.
Rosalie Napaim'an is one of the people supplying goods to be sold at
Nahuel
Pan. It takes her one whole day to weave a 25cm-wide wall hanging on her
loom made from tree branches, and up to ten days to make a rug. Museo
Leleque plans to start selling Mapuche and Tehuelche Indian hangings to
its
customers by the end of the year. 'It will provide work for regional
people,' explains Carolina di Palma, who works at Benetton's Buenos Aires office.
Most visitors arrive at Nahuel Pan by another tourist attraction, La
Trochita, the Old Patagonian Express. Built between 1910 and 1945 to transport people and goods across the Patagonian steppe, the train now
mainly carries tourists as it rhythmically lurches and judders along a
single narrow-guage track from Esquel.
Another plan is to build a station
so the train can bring visitors to the museum. This will offer modern-day
passengers a chance to travel in historic style across the estancia on
which Museo Leleque stands and from which many of its artefacts have been taken. While not quite as authentic as arriving by boat on Argentinia's east
coast, the slow ride across the vast, unchanging plains will highlight the
mammoth
achievements made by the first settlers who arrived with so little, but
managed to make Patagonia their home.
Want to see Patagonia for yourself? Then check out all our
Patagonia holidays 
