OK, here I am with the second installment of my trip to the Northwestern Patagonia.
This one is dedicated exclusively to the town of Trevelin -it's original name was Tre Felin, which in Welsh language means "Town of the Mill"- and Cwm Hyfryd -meaning "pleasant", "lovely" or "beautiful valley" in Welsh-, both in the province of Chubut.
Unless you are Welsh or have heard the story, you might be wondering "why Welsh? What does it have to do there?". Well, the town was founded by Welsh pioneers in the late 19th Century. I was aiming at writing a brief story about it as an introduction, but let's say that it ended up being not as brief as I had in mind when I started, so instead of pasting it here I uploaded it to Dropbox (be warned it is not "readable" in one go or two, it would take a few days):
www.dropbox.com/s/9fxwc0eq1fy5e6i/Y%20Wladfa.docx?dl=0 Needless to say no one is expected to read it as it is too long and the subject might not be of your interest (besides, you might find tons of mistakes due to me not being an English native speaker), but I decided to paste it all the same. In any case, if you are Welsh you might find yourself more closely related to it and I'd totally recommend you reading about the subject, be it via this essay I uploaded here or other sources (but try to avoid stone-cold, boring encyclopedic reports). You'll probably see this whole thing very differently.
We had come from the north, from the also Welsh-founded city of Esquel. What's the first thing you see in Trevelin? Yeap, dragons:
...and more dragons...
...and more dragons. This one is from one of the Welsh tea houses in the town.
...and if you count the coat of arms of the town, showing here on a welcome sign in the main square, that's one more dragon.
A couple more from the central square
It's a very flowery town...
...where the signs are in both Spanish and Welsh
Another tea house.
A chapel by dusk. I don't think this one is Welsh, as it looks different to all the Welsh chapels in the area, but I couldn't tell for sure. In the inside it's beautiful, but there were people praying so I didn't want to take pictures.
And random shops like this haberdashery, and anything at any moment, might have something to do with Wales
The place where we slept at.
Now from the inside. It was a very pretty and well-equipped cabin I must say. Now, in case of a fire better start praying because it will probably burn down in 5 minutes with all that wood.
That night my co-pilot and I had an exquisite trout (they fish them in a nearby river) at a local restaurant. Don't think it was always like this, this was an outlier. The norm during the trip was sandwiches or empanadas.
By the way, notice two things: 1- Me representing ELO. 2- My friend was drinking wine while I, a true teetotaler, was just having water.
Sometimes when looking at pictures I amaze myself at how little self-conscious I am of the clothes I am wearing. Look at that outfit, t-shirt and scarf (hard to tell if it was hot or cold)! In that moment I was never aware of the combination I was sporting. But hey, someone has to create fashion...
I can self-indulge in the fact that I was clearly still half-asleep though.
We had come to Trevelin for the Welsh experience, so we headed to Nain Maggie (named after Maggie Freeman-Jones, a woman who was very important in the town many decades ago), one of the tea houses, to experience a Patagonic-Welsh breakfast.
I barely survived it. It's expensive, but the amount of things that they bring you -one more exquisite than the other- is overhelming. At one point we were so stuffed that we asked the waitress if we could pack up the rest and take it away with us, and luckily she said yes, otherwise it would have been criminal to leave such delicacies there. We ate pieces of Welsh bakery for the following two days.
On the center of the plate you see bara brith, the typical Welsh black pudding, a personal favourite. Welsh cakes were also featured. he cakes and biscuits they prepare here are not purely Welsh but incorporate elements that the Welsh colonists of the Patagonia adopted and even produced themselves, like dulce de leche. There was one particular delicacy with dulce de leche which was ridiculously good.
I had asked
vlogdance for a few basic phrases in Welsh in order to joke with the waitress, but unfortunately that very morning, half a block away from the tea house, an old lady who had worked there had passed away (her name was Juana Williams, we saw it in the hearse; undoubtedly of Welsh ascent). The mood in the tea house wasn't exactly suitable for jokes and laughing, so I chose to be discreet and keep the phrases that Vlog had taught me to myself. Maybe next time...
Add one Red Dragon to the count
And the tea house has like a mini museum. Here, some of the Welsh castles
Poetry. Don't ask me what it means
, but that's two more dragons
Next we went to the Molino Andes, the tallest building in town (yeah, being only 4 floors high). It was built more than a century ago by John Daniel Evans, one of the main pioneers. It used to be a mill where the production of wheat of the valley was turned into flower. Now it's a fantastic museum, about the best I've seen, dedicated to the history of the town. In this place is where the story of the Welsh conquest of Chubut really hooked me. The lady at the door told me that when Welsh visitors make it this far and visit this musem they often cry when they get to know the history of their nationals in these lands so vividly.
These seats are related to Eisteddfod, a Welsh traditional celebration which, besides Wales of course, also has place in Trevelin and a few other cities in Chubut
I'm sure Welsh being the oldest language in Europe has to be a very disputed fact, but I cannot say it's not true
An intensive course
The banners are in 3 languages: Spanish (because we are in Argentina), Welsh (for obvious reasons) and English (for tourists who don't know any of those two languages)
List of passengers who arrived in the Mimosa, the ship which brought the first Welsh contingent to the Patagonian shores in 1865. As you would expect, the typical Welsh surnames are there in numbers: Williams, Evans, Thomas, Jenkins, Davies, Hughes, Roberts... and, of course, lots and lots of Jones
Representation of the Mimosa
Survivors of the Mimosa
Welsh and music, a classic combo
No idea, honestly
At the museum there was also a 40-minute long video featuring very old takes (from the beginning of the 20th Century) where people who had taken part in the conquest of Chubut -and some others who had been told the story by the heroes themselves- gave their testimony. I asked if it was on the internet or there was a any way to get it but they said no, that the BBC of Wales had made the video and given it to them under a no-distribution agreement. In any case, the video had audio in Welsh and subtitles in Spanish, so it wasn't suited for exclusively English-speaking people.
Once we were done with the museum, we headed to other parts of Trevelin. This building is the Bethel Chapel. This is how most of the Welsh chapels in the Patagonia look like. They are all very old, more than a century.
Then we headed to Nant y Fall, a series of falls in an area in the beautiful valley where Trevelin lies, just south of the town:
This one almost kills 3 of the main Welsh explorers who first got to the valley
Me and my fear of heights
And then, as the last stop, we visited Nant Fach, a mill in the valley. As opposed to the other one, this one isn't historic. It was built by it's owner Mervyn Evans in the '60s or '70s, I can't remember well. Mervyn Evans is an extremely charismatic and outgoing guy who also officiates as the guide. In his own words, these days the mill gives him more income as a museum than as a flour producing mill.
The wheel of the mill
Inside the mill works another museum dedicated to the conquest of Cwm Hyfryd
Some Welsh surnames, as have been changed by English censuses. In 3rd place you might find a familiar surname for us forumheads.
And talking about familiar surnames, on that same wall we found this...
This guy is featured in the museum as the villain. He was Belgian, and he represented the company Bunge & Born, which lobbied with argentine President Juan Domingo Peron to obtain a presidential decreet forbidding the production of wheat in Chubut. In that way many families in Trevelin saw their business ruined.
Besides being an asshole, his surname "Bunge" sounds ridiculous. Imagine going through life with that surname...
The Beautiful Valley is, indeed, beautiful
Well, that's all my friends. We had a great day in this remarkably likely place. My parents discovered it in 2016 and since then they have returned a few times and I'm planning on going back too because I liked it a lot and there's so much more to see. I came back loaded with bara brith and 3 excellent books about the Welsh conquest of Chubut.
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