🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Sarmiento is a surprising green oasis in the middle of the Patagonian steppe, a farming town ringed by smallholdings, poplars and two big lakes (Musters and Colhué Huapi) in south-central Chubut province. Founded at the start of the 20th century by a mix of settlers —South African Boers, Welsh, Lithuanians and criollos among them— it owes its fertility to the Senguer river, which waters the valley and allows cherries, soft fruit and vegetables to grow in the middle of an arid landscape.
Its big draw is the José Ormachea Petrified Forest, a provincial protected area where erosion has laid bare the fossilised trunks of trees that lived some 65 million years ago, in a lunar landscape of multicoloured bluffs, canyons and eroded formations. It is one of the most accessible and most striking petrified forests in Patagonia, and it pairs with the nearby Víctor Szlápelis Petrified Forest.
Quiet and unvarnished, Sarmiento is an ideal stop for anyone crossing central Patagonia on Route 26 and through the Comodoro Rivadavia area, combining one-off geological landscapes, lake and steppe nature, a settlement with multicultural roots and the calm of a country town where time seems to move slowly.
Sarmiento was officially founded in 1897 (Colonia Sarmiento) as a farming settlement in the Senguer river valley, peopled by settlers of varied origins: Boers who arrived after the Anglo-Boer War, Welsh from the Chubut valley, Lithuanians, Chileans and criollos. Irrigation from the Senguer turned the steppe into a productive oasis. Its name honours Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. 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.
For much of the 20th century you could hear Afrikaans spoken on the smallholdings of Sarmiento: it was the language of the South African Boers who, beaten by the British Empire, crossed the Atlantic to start again on the Chubut steppe. That is only one of the improbable stories of this Patagonian oasis. In the late 19th century the Argentine state was pushing to occupy Patagonia in earnest after the military campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s, and in that context the fertile valley of the Senguer river, in what is now south-central Chubut, was chosen for a farming colony that would use the river's water to make the steppe produce.
Colonia Sarmiento was officially founded in 1897 and took its name in tribute to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the Argentine educator and president. Unlike other Patagonian colonies, Sarmiento stood out for the sheer variety of its settlers' origins. Among the first were Welsh families from the lower Chubut valley, criollos, Chileans and, most distinctively, a contingent of Boers, farmers of Dutch descent who emigrated from southern Africa after the Anglo-Boer War.
Lithuanian immigrants and others followed later, making for an unusually multicultural community. The work of channelling and irrigating the Senguer river turned arid land into productive smallholdings, giving rise to the green oasis ringed by steppe that still defines Sarmiento today.
The case of the Boer settlers is perhaps the most singular in the whole settlement of Patagonia. After their defeat by the British in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), several hundred Boer families, mainly from South Africa, looked for new land where they could keep farming without the British Empire present. The Argentine government offered them land in the Senguer valley, and so they came to settle in the area, bringing with them their language (Afrikaans, spoken in the colony for generations), their Calvinist faith and their farming methods. Over time much of that Boer community emigrated again, many going back to South Africa after the end of apartheid, but their cultural and architectural mark remains in the town.
Sarmiento's great natural heritage goes back to a time far older than the colony. Tens of millions of years ago, during the Tertiary period, the region had a warm, humid climate very different from today's, and was covered in extensive forests. Intense volcanic activity in the Andes, then still forming, buried those forests under ash and sediment.
In that setting the fallen trunks went through permineralisation: mineral-laden water seeped into the wood and, cell by cell, replaced the organic matter with silica and other compounds, preserving the structure of the trees in astonishing detail. The result is petrified trunks, literally turned to stone, that still hold their growth rings and the texture of their bark.
As the eras passed, the uplift of the land and erosion by wind and water exposed these fossils at the surface, leaving them in plain view in a spectacular landscape of multicoloured bluffs and canyons. To protect this heritage, the natural areas of the José Ormachea Petrified Forest and the Víctor Szlápelis Petrified Forest were created, and today they let visitors walk among the remains of jungles that vanished millions of years ago.
Through the 20th century, Sarmiento consolidated its farming profile thanks to irrigation from the Senguer. Cherries, soft fruit, vegetables and fodder made the valley a productive hub within arid central Patagonia. Being close to Comodoro Rivadavia, the capital of Argentine oil, also tied the area to the regional hydrocarbon economy.
The natural setting completes the identity of the place. Lakes Musters and Colhué Huapi, fed by the Senguer, are bodies of water of great importance: the Musters supplies drinking water to much of the region and offers fishing and water sports, while the shallower Colhué Huapi swings markedly with the water it receives, shrinking drastically in drought years and laying bare wide mud flats that are covered again when the river's flow recovers.
In recent decades tourism has become a significant activity too, drawn above all by the petrified forests, the lakes and the town's singular multicultural history. Sarmiento keeps its character as a quiet farming town, with its regional museum, its cherry chacras —the harvest runs from November to late January— and its popular festivals, among them the traditional Festival de Doma y Folclore that draws hundreds of visitors every February, while also positioning itself as a stop of geological and scenic interest on routes across central Patagonia, between the Atlantic coast and the cordillera. The combination of water, immigration history and age-old fossils makes Sarmiento a destination that sums up, in a few square kilometres, much of the geological and human layering that makes up Patagonia.
Long before the colony, the Senguer valley and lakes Musters and Colhué Huapi were the territory of the Tehuelche (Aónikenk) peoples, hunter-gatherers who ranged across the Patagonian steppe and used these bodies of water as camping grounds and as places to hunt guanaco and rhea. The names of the lakes themselves point back to that age of exploration: Lago Musters recalls the British officer George Chaworth Musters, who in 1869-1870 crossed Patagonia from south to north travelling with Tehuelche groups and left one of the first detailed accounts of the region.
The area's great palaeontological heritage —the petrified trunks— was known to local people early on, but its study and public recognition took shape in the 20th century. The name of one of the forests, José Ormachea, honours the man associated with its discovery and promotion, while the Víctor Szlápelis recalls another local figure tied to the area. Over time geologists and palaeontologists identified in these deposits the remains of a flora from the Cretaceous-Palaeogene period (around 65 million years old), which made Sarmiento a reference point for understanding the ancient subtropical forests that covered Patagonia before the Andes rose.
To protect this treasure, the natural areas of the José Ormachea Petrified Forest and the Víctor Szlápelis Petrified Forest were established, now brought together as a Provincial Natural Monument. The Desiderio Torres Regional Museum, in town, rounds out the story by bringing together fossils, Tehuelche archaeological material and testimony from the settlement years, so that Sarmiento's natural history and human history are told side by side.