🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Gobernador Costa is a small town in western Chubut, set on the Patagonian steppe along the historic Ruta Nacional 40, in the transition zone towards the cordillera. It's a classic stop for anyone driving the mythical Patagonian Ruta 40 or moving between the north and south of the province, a place for services and rest amid great distances and landscapes of steppe, valleys and rivers.
Set in the valley of the Genoa river, in a sheep-ranching area, Gobernador Costa keeps the air of the towns of deep Patagonia: quiet, low houses, with service stations, lodgings and shops that support the traveler. Its surroundings offer trout fishing in rivers and streams, steppe landscapes of wide horizons and the nearness of the cordillera to the west.
For the traveler, Gobernador Costa is above all a strategic stop on the road, a chance to restock, rest and get a look at life in a Patagonian country town. It's also the gateway to the mountain region of western Chubut — about 180 km from Esquel — and one more link on the route of Ruta 40, which connects the great destinations of southern Argentina across this immensity of steppe.
Gobernador Costa took shape as a town of the Chubut steppe tied to sheep ranching, on lot 53 of the San Martín colony, in the valley of the Genoa river. Its founding date is taken as February 28, 1925, and by national decree in 1937 it was named in homage to Manuel Costa, governor of what was then the National Territory of Chubut (1924-1925). It grew as a rural service center and a stop on Ruta 40 in the west of the province. The full version is on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of Atlantic and Andean Patagonia: Tehuelche and Mapuche land, setting of the only large Welsh colony in the Americas, cradle of Argentine oil at Comodoro Rivadavia, home to the whales of Península Valdés and to the thousand-year-old forest of Los Alerces.
Read the history of Chubut →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The name 'Genoa', now carried by the river and the valley where Gobernador Costa sits, has nothing to do with the Italian city: it's a phonetic corruption of 'Henno Kaik', which in the language of the area's indigenous peoples meant something like 'Henno's stopping place'. The first person to record that name for Western maps was the English explorer George C. Musters, who crossed Patagonia between 1869 and 1870 and left a written account of a territory that history books tended to present as 'empty', but which in fact had its own names, routes and meanings long before the arrival of the Argentine state.
Gobernador Costa grew up as a town of the western Chubut steppe, in the valley of the Genoa river, in a region historically given over to livestock. After Patagonia was absorbed into the Argentine state in the late 19th century, these vast steppe lands were slowly settled with estancias raising sheep, the region's traditional economic activity.
Wool and mutton were, for decades, the livelihood of the area, organized into large rural estates separated by enormous distances. In that context, the small towns served as centers for services, collection and supply for the scattered rural population of the steppe.
The town's name honors a governor of what was then the National Territory of Chubut, a nod to the period when the Patagonian region was administered directly by the central government as a national territory, without the autonomy of a province, a situation that lasted until provincial status came in the mid-20th century.
The development of Gobernador Costa was shaped by its position on the route of Ruta Nacional 40, the mythical highway that runs the length of Argentina from north to south, mostly parallel to the Andes. In western Chubut, Ruta 40 crosses the steppe linking towns separated by great distances, and Gobernador Costa established itself as one of its stops.
Its role as a waypoint and service town defined much of local life. Service stations, lodgings, shops and diners supported travelers, truckers, tourists and settlers crossing the Patagonian immensity. In a territory of wide horizons and sparse settlement, these service points were — and still are — vital for anyone moving through the region.
With the boom in Patagonian tourism and the growing popularity of driving Ruta 40 as an experience in itself, Gobernador Costa kept its role as a link on the road between the great destinations of the south. Holding on to its character as a ranching and country town, it remains a necessary stop on the crossing of the western Chubut steppe, between the central region and the cordillera.
Long before Ruta 40 was laid out or the first estancias were built, the valley of the Genoa river and the steppe of western Chubut were the territory of indigenous peoples. The Tehuelche (Aónikenk) moved across this land as nomadic hunter-gatherers, following the guanaco and the rhea through the Patagonian immensity, while in the centuries before the state conquest came the process of araucanization, with the arrival and integration of Mapuche-speaking groups from the mountains to the west.
The rivers and streams of the valley, such as the Genoa, were natural routes and sources of water in an arid region, and the area's place names preserve that indigenous substrate. The incorporation of Patagonia into the Argentine state through the so-called Conquest of the Desert, between the late 1870s and the early 1880s, profoundly altered this world: the communities were displaced, subdued or scattered, and the land was opened to colonization and large-scale sheep ranching.
The memory of that indigenous population lives on in the region through communities, place names and traditions, and it is part of the historical backdrop of the towns of the Chubut steppe such as Gobernador Costa, which arose on a territory with thousands of years of human occupation before the roads and fences were drawn.
In 1955 the National Territory of Chubut became a province, completing the political integration of Patagonia into the country. Gobernador Costa, whose name recalls one of the highest authorities of the old territory, was folded into the new provincial structure as one of the western towns, in Tehuelches department, of which it is the seat.
Through the second half of the 20th century, the life of the town continued to revolve around sheep ranching, serving the scattered rural population and, increasingly, the traffic on Ruta 40. Building and improving the road, the arrival of electricity, schools and public services gradually consolidated the town as a local center, in a region marked by low population density and great distances.
In recent decades, the ups and downs of the wool economy and the challenges of life on the steppe have coexisted with growing tourist interest in deep Patagonia and Ruta 40. Gobernador Costa keeps its character as a country town and a waypoint today: a necessary stop, with its service station, its lodgings and its diners, for anyone crossing western Chubut heading for the cordillera or the far south.
One of the most singular and least known chapters in the history of this region has a name of its own: Valentín Sayhueque, the great general chief of the Manzanas, who had resisted the Argentine Army's advance on Patagonia for years and was finally defeated and captured in 1885, at the height of the Conquest of the Desert. Unlike other indigenous leaders, Sayhueque did not vanish from history after his surrender: he was released years later, and in 1896 the Argentine state assigned him a tribal 'new land' in western Chubut, near what is now Gobernador Costa, where he settled with thirteen children and several Mapuche families.
That settlement, the product of an unequal negotiation between a defeated people and a state in full expansion, left a deep mark on the area: much of the population and many of the surnames in the Genoa valley region trace back to that resettled Mapuche-Tehuelche origin, a crossing of histories that rarely appears on the tourist signs along Ruta 40 but which explains a great deal about the identity of western Chubut today.
The town as such, with its street grid and its present name, has a precise birth date: it was officially founded on February 28, 1925, as a meeting point for small rural producers, passing traders and descendants of the area's indigenous peoples. The founding date taken was the day the territory's governor visited the 'new town' built on lot 53 of the San Martín colony. The definitive name came later: by national decree of May 26, 1937, the town was named in posthumous homage to Manuel Costa, the governor of the National Territory of Chubut (1924-1925) who had made that visit, following the logic by which new Patagonian towns were named at the time.