Bore da todos! Apologies for the long delay but have been moving very fast since I left Patagonia as such the blog is running about a week and a half behind realtime. I will be trying to get us up to speed over the next few days.
Today we explore the town of the mill and see just what wonders this lost place holds!
So to begin Trevelin is quite a small place being a small town that is centered mostly around the circular plaza in the northern part and the bit where I stayed. There are places around it though it is not easy to go without your own car, however I did get out to some waterfalls. I’ll cover this one in a different post.
Anyways to explore Trevelin the first stop was the Welsh History museum here and my gaff happened to be literally across the road from it. Going inside we learn all about the history of the Welsh Settlement and colony this place was.
Trevelin was the end result of a joint Welsh-Argentine expedition in 1885 to build a colony in the “Valley of October 16” near the Andes which resulted in this little town being established and as the name implies several mills were built here to provide grain to the other welsh settlement on the eastern side of Patagonia and to further afield in Argentina.
It was a harsh existence setting up a colony out here this far south from the larger cities and coastlines of Argentina and in fact the colony did almost fail and would have failed if one of the local mapuche tribes didn’t help them when a particularly harsh winter meant they had little food on them.
Once the colony got properly established it thrived throughout the early 1900’s for a while as a mill town exporting grain back to Trelew in the East and further afield in Argentina.
Trevelin would later decline in the 1930s as railroad expansion further north meant that other mills closer to Buenos Aires could sell their grain cheaper and get them to the cities way quicker and Trevelin was not able to compete with this. Eventually the mills stopped running in the early 1950’s.
Today Trevelin is a testament to the Welsh Pioneers who traversed the vast steppe to set up this place and to the hard work and ingenuity that went into establishing this place. Though very little Welsh is spoken here today people I talked to are proud of their past and there still is a school that teaches Welsh here.
While small it is quite a fascinating and almost surreal place this little Wales in the Andes.
Leave a Reply