🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
In the lower valley of the Chubut river, Trelew and Gaiman are the living heart of Welsh settlement in Patagonia. Here the colonists who landed at Puerto Madryn in 1865 found the land and the water they were looking for, and built villages, farms, chapels and mills that still carry the stamp of the culture they brought from Wales. Travelling through them is a trip back in time, between Welsh tea, the story of the pioneers and the region's palaeontological treasures.
Trelew — 'Lewis's town' in Welsh, in honor of its founder Lewis Jones — is the service town of the valley and home to one of the most important museums in South America: the Egidio Feruglio Palaeontology Museum (MEF), where Patagonian dinosaurs such as giant titanosaurs and other extraordinary finds are on display. It is also the air gateway to the whole area, including nearby Puerto Madryn.
A few kilometers away, Gaiman is the Welsh village par excellence: quiet, leafy and endearing, famous across the country for its tea houses, where the classic Welsh tea is served with homemade cakes and sweets following recipes handed down from the first settlers. Together with nearby Punta Tombo — and its enormous penguin colony — and the closeness of Península Valdés, Trelew and Gaiman round out one of the most singular corners of Atlantic Patagonia: Argentina's Wales.
Trelew and Gaiman were born out of the Welsh settlement of Chubut. On 28 July 1865, around 150 Welsh colonists landed at Puerto Madryn aboard the sailing ship Mimosa, fleeing poverty and the ban on their language in British schools, in search of a place where they could preserve their tongue and their culture. From the coast they marched towards the Chubut river valley, where they founded Rawson and built, through an ingenious irrigation system, a prosperous farming colony. Gaiman was one of the first villages in the valley (its street grid was laid out around 1874) and became the core of Welsh life, with its chapels, its cemetery, its school and, in time, its famous tea houses. Trelew appeared at the end of the 19th century tied to the railway: its name means 'Lewis's town' in Welsh, in honor of Lewis Jones, the driving force behind the train that in 1889 linked the valley with Puerto Madryn, making it easier to move produce to the port. Trelew grew as the valley's commercial and service center, while Gaiman kept its profile as a traditional Welsh village. In the 20th century the region added industry (especially wool and textiles), fruit farming in the valley and, later, tourism: the Welsh heritage, the tea houses, Punta Tombo and its penguins, and palaeontology, with Trelew's Egidio Feruglio Museum as the great reference point. Today Trelew and Gaiman combine history, Welsh culture, science and nature, next door to Puerto Madryn and 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.
The story of Trelew and Gaiman actually begins in Wales. In the mid-19th century a group of Welsh people, pushed by poverty, by the failure of nationalist hopes and, above all, by the fear of losing their language to the advance of English — imposed in public life and in schools — dreamed of founding a colony somewhere remote where they could live freely and keep their culture. After looking at several options, they chose Argentine Patagonia.
On 28 July 1865, around 150 Welsh colonists landed at Puerto Madryn after a long crossing from Liverpool aboard the sailing ship Mimosa. The coast they found was arid and hostile, with no fresh water in sight. They realized that to survive they had to head south, in search of the Chubut river valley, which they had heard described as land with water and workable soil.
The men walked to the valley, and the families joined them later. There, beside the Chubut river, they founded Rawson and began to build the colony. The first years were brutal: lost harvests, hunger and isolation almost sank the project. But the settlers held on, and with ingenuity and hard work they tamed the valley, laying the foundations of the towns to come: among them Gaiman and Trelew.
The key to the Welsh colony's success was water. After several years of failed harvests, the settlers understood that Patagonia's scarce rain was not enough, and they developed an ingenious irrigation system: canals that took water from the Chubut river and spread it across the farms of the valley. That system, a first in the region, turned the arid valley into a prosperous farming area.
With irrigation secured, the colony flourished. The lower Chubut valley filled with wheat farms and other crops, and the Welsh built flour mills to process their harvest. Chubut wheat went on to win international awards for its quality. Around the farms grew villages, chapels (the famous 'Welsh chapels' where the community gathered), schools and cemeteries, which shaped an organized and hard-working society.
Gaiman was one of the first villages in the valley: its street grid was laid out around 1874 and it became one of the most distinctive centers of Welsh life, with its brick architecture, its chapels and, later, its tea houses. The Welsh valley — with Rawson, Gaiman, Dolavon and other settlements — thus became a unique settlement story in Patagonia, one that left a cultural mark that is still very much alive.
While Gaiman was establishing itself as a farming village and the center of Welsh life, Trelew came later and with a different profile, tied to the railway. At the end of the 19th century, to move the valley's produce to the sea, a railway was built to link the farming area with Puerto Madryn, where the port was. The train opened in 1889 and proved decisive for the region's development.
Trelew grew up around that railway station, and its name says it all: it means 'Lewis's town' in Welsh, in honor of Lewis Jones, one of the driving figures behind the colony and behind the railway itself ('tre' is town and 'lew' comes from Lewis). The new settlement grew quickly as a freight, trade and service point, becoming in time the most important town in the lower Chubut valley.
That set the roles the two towns largely keep to this day: Trelew as the urban, commercial and service center — and, later, the region's air gateway — and Gaiman as the traditional Welsh village, smaller and more endearing, keeper of the settlers' cultural legacy.
Through the 20th century the region changed and diversified. Non-Welsh immigration, industry — textiles and wool above all — and fruit farming in the valley reshaped the economy, while the Welsh community kept its traditions alive: the language, the chapels, the choirs, the eisteddfod (festivals of song and poetry) and, of course, Welsh tea.
In time that cultural legacy also became a major tourist draw. Gaiman became famous across the country for its tea houses, where the classic Welsh tea is served with cakes and sweets following recipes handed down from the settlers, and for its historic heritage. Trelew, for its part, added an attraction of international standing: the Egidio Feruglio Palaeontology Museum (MEF), one of the most important in South America, which displays the extraordinary dinosaurs found in Patagonia.
Today Trelew and Gaiman combine history, Welsh culture, science and nature. Neighbors of Puerto Madryn and Península Valdés, and a base for visiting the penguin colony at Punta Tombo, they are part of one of the most singular corners of Atlantic Patagonia: 'Argentina's Wales', where the legacy of those Mimosa settlers is still putting down roots more than a century and a half later.
Alongside the story of the Welsh settlers and the Patagonian dinosaurs, Trelew also holds a tragic episode that marked 20th-century Argentine political history: the Trelew Massacre. On 15 August 1972, in the middle of the dictatorship that called itself the 'Argentine Revolution', headed by General Alejandro Lanusse, twenty-five political prisoners from armed organizations (ERP, FAR and Montoneros) broke out of the maximum-security prison in Rawson, a few kilometers from Trelew, and reached the city's old airport with the aim of escaping to Salvador Allende's Chile.
The plan only half worked: just six escapees managed to board the plane that left for Chile. The remaining nineteen, seeing the escape fail, gave themselves up to the military authorities on the promise that they would be taken back to the Rawson prison and that their safety would be respected. Instead, they were taken to the Almirante Zar Naval Air Base in Trelew. In the early hours of 22 August 1972, the guards took them out of their cells and opened fire. Sixteen of the nineteen prisoners were shot dead; only Alberto Miguel Camps, María Antonia Berger and Ricardo René Haidar survived, seriously wounded.
For decades the event was officially presented as a failed escape attempt, until judicial investigations and the survivors' testimony established that it had been a planned execution. Only in 2012, almost forty years later, did the courts sentence three of the naval officers responsible to life imprisonment. Today Trelew's old airport works as a Centro Cultural por la Memoria, and every 22 August the city remembers the victims of what is known as the Trelew Massacre, an early and brutal forerunner of the state violence Argentina would live through on a far larger scale during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.