🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
On the sheltered waters of the Nuevo gulf, on the Atlantic coast of Chubut, Puerto Madryn is one of the great capitals of nature tourism in Argentina. Its broad waterfront, its beaches and its sea, relatively warm for Patagonia, make it pleasant for a stroll and a swim in summer, but its great fame comes from the sea itself: it is the gateway to Península Valdés and one of the best places in the world to see the southern right whale up close.
Every year, between autumn and spring, southern right whales come into the Nuevo and San José gulfs to mate and calve, and can be watched from boats and even from the shore. Add to that the sea lions and elephant seals, the Magellanic penguins and the enormous mainland colony at Punta Tombo, and a rich underwater life that makes Madryn a leading destination for diving and snorkelling.
The town also has a very strong historical identity: this is where, on 28 July 1865, the first Welsh settlers to reach Patagonia landed aboard the sailing ship Mimosa, looking for a place to preserve their language and their culture. That heritage, along with the nature, the museums and the seafood, makes Puerto Madryn an ideal starting point for discovering the best of the Patagonian coast.
The Nuevo gulf area was inhabited for millennia by indigenous peoples, especially the Tehuelche (Aonikenk and Gününa küne), hunter-gatherers who roamed the Patagonian steppe and coast. The name 'Madryn' comes from Sir Love Jones-Parry, Baron of Madryn (in Wales), who explored these coasts in 1862 looking for a site for the Welsh colony, and named the place after his Welsh estate. The founding milestone of the town is the Welsh landing: on 28 July 1865, around 150 Welsh settlers arrived aboard the sailing ship Mimosa, which had left Liverpool, and landed in what was then the inhospitable Bahía Nueva. They were fleeing poverty, a frustrated independence movement and the ban on their language in British schools, and they were looking for a territory where they could keep their language and culture freely. Those first settlers sheltered in caves dug into the bluff — in what is now the Punta Cuevas Historic Park — before setting off for the Chubut river valley, where they would found Rawson, Trelew and Gaiman. Puerto Madryn's growth as a town came later, driven by the railway that linked it with the Chubut valley (1889), by the port, and in the 20th century by industry — with the Aluar aluminium plant installed in the 1970s — and, finally, by nature tourism. Today, declared the 'National Capital of Diving', Puerto Madryn lives largely off tourism tied to the whales, the marine wildlife and nearby Península Valdés. The full story is on our 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.
Picture 150 people stepping off a sailing ship after two months at sea, hoping to find the fertile valley they had been promised, and finding instead an arid coast, not a tree in sight and not a drop of fresh water nearby. They had not been shipwrecked: they had arrived exactly where they meant to. That is how Puerto Madryn began, one of the few towns in the world founded not by conquest or by accident, but by the deliberate decision of a whole people to reinvent itself 8,000 kilometres from home.
Long before the Europeans arrived, the Nuevo gulf region and the Atlantic coast of Chubut were inhabited by the Tehuelche peoples — Aonikenk in the south and Gününa küne (northern Tehuelche) in the north — hunter-gatherers who roamed the immense Patagonian steppe and came down to the coast to use its resources. They were skilled hunters of guanaco and rhea, and knew this land of sea, cliffs and plateau perfectly, adapted to an extreme climate of constant wind and scant rain.
Atlantic Patagonia was sighted and travelled by European navigators from the 16th century, in the age of the great voyages of exploration, but for centuries it remained a remote land with few settlers. The Nuevo gulf, a large sheltered bay, offered a natural anchorage on an otherwise hostile, wind-battered coast, though no European colonisation project had taken hold there for good.
Only in the mid-19th century did this coast begin to attract a lasting colonisation project, tied neither to Argentina nor to Spain but to a people seeking, far from their land, a place to survive as a community: the Welsh. Their arrival would mark the history of Puerto Madryn and of the whole Chubut valley forever, and would give rise to one of the most singular chapters of immigration in Argentina: a colony that, unlike so many others, did not come looking for gold or easy fertile land, but for a cultural refuge.
The town's name is Welsh in origin and comes from Sir Love Jones-Parry, Baron of Madryn. In 1862 this Welsh nobleman travelled to Patagonia with Lewis Jones — another key figure in the colonisation — to explore the coast and judge whether the region was suitable for the colony they were planning back in Wales. They were looking for a distant, sparsely populated territory where their people could live freely, keeping their language and their culture.
On that exploration they covered the Nuevo gulf area, and the place where the town would later rise was named 'Madryn', after Jones-Parry's Welsh estate. So, even before the settlement existed, the site already bore a name brought from Wales, a record of the mark that culture would leave across the whole region.
The Welsh colonisation project grew out of a mix of motives: poverty and hard living conditions in Wales, the failure of nationalist aspirations and, above all, the fear of losing Welsh identity in the face of English, which was being imposed in public life and in the schools. Patagonia, vast and empty, seemed the ideal place to start again.
28 July 1865 is the founding date of Puerto Madryn and a milestone in the whole history of Patagonia. That day, around 150 Welsh settlers landed at what was then known as Bahía Nueva, after a long, hard voyage from Liverpool aboard the sailing ship Mimosa, an old cargo vessel converted for the trip. The group had set out driven by poverty, by a frustrated independence movement and by the ban on their language in British schools.
The reality they found was bleak: an arid, windy coast with no fresh water in sight, very different from the fertile land some had imagined. To survive those first weeks, the settlers dug caves into the bluff near the sea, at the site now known as Punta Cuevas, preserved as a historic park with a Landing Museum that tells the story of that ordeal.
Soon afterwards, the men began walking south in search of the Chubut river valley, where they would find the water and the arable land they needed. There they founded the towns of Rawson, Trelew and Gaiman, the core of the Welsh colony. In those first years Puerto Madryn remained more a landing point than a place of settlement, but the date of 28 July was engraved as its birth and is celebrated every year with the Landing Festival.
After the landing, Puerto Madryn grew slowly as the point of contact between the sea and the colony in the valley. A decisive push came in 1889 with the opening of the railway linking Puerto Madryn with the Chubut river valley (Trelew), easing the transport of people and of Welsh farm produce to the port. The town began to establish itself as the region's port centre, though for decades it remained a modest place, well behind Trelew and Gaiman in population, the real centres of the Welsh colony in the valley.
Through the 20th century, Madryn diversified its economy. A deep change came in the 1970s with the installation of the Aluar aluminium plant, the first producer of primary aluminium in Argentina, which turned the town into an industrial hub and drew people and work from across the country. That industrial activity coexisted, over time, with the growing development of tourism, which would eventually give the town its most recognisable profile in the following decades.
The closeness of Península Valdés — declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1999 for its exceptional natural values — and the presence of the southern right whale, sea lions and elephant seals and penguins turned Puerto Madryn into one of the great capitals of nature tourism in Argentina. The southern right whale, which had been driven to the brink of extinction by commercial hunting in the 19th and early 20th centuries, found in the sheltered waters of the Nuevo and San José gulfs an ideal sanctuary in which to breed, and its mass return is now one of the great symbols of successful conservation in Patagonia.
Today Puerto Madryn is also known as the 'National Capital of Diving', and much of its life revolves around the sea: the whales, the wildlife, the trips to Valdés and Punta Tombo, never forgetting the Welsh heritage it was born from. Every 28 July the town relives the landing of the Mimosa with the Landing Festival, a reminder that this Patagonian capital of nature tourism was born, above all, of the stubbornness of a handful of families who refused to let their language die.