In 1865, a customised tea clipper called the Mimosa delivered around 150 Welsh men, women and children to an uninhabited corner of southern Argentina. In 2015, 1843 magazine travelled to Patagonia to see how Welsh the community still is
in a primary school on the edge of Trelew. An autumn sun toasts red-shirted children pinging about the playground. It is an ordinary scene, but for the odd compound of languages filling the air. The children flit between Spanish – and Welsh.
The story begins in a circular bay bitten into the Atlantic coastline. Puerto Madryn takes its name from an estate on the Llyn peninsula in north Wales. It was here that thespilled its queasy passengers after two months at sea. A marble monument lists their names and place of origin . But Madryn is mostly indifferent to its Welsh roots. So I am told by Fernando Coronato as we look across the wide bay where apartment blocks stand sentry under a blustery sky.
How green was their valley? The satellite image of the Dyffryn shows a green wedge in a desiccated expanse of soft sedimentary rock. I clamber up its fossil-rich southern rampart. Under a big sky, I look down on gleaming pastures criss-crossed by poplars and cypresses planted by the Welsh as boundary markers and windbreaks. Its beauty is entirely man-made.
One sun-drenched morning I visit the farm of a septuagenarian bachelor called Aldwyn Brunt, who gives me a tour of pigs, horses, merino sheep and maize, while mosquitoes feast on my forearms. Aldwyn, who has beautiful blue eyes, lives with his taller, shyer, younger brother. I’m reminded of the inseparable twins in “On the Black Hill”, Chatwin’s novel set in the Black Mountains. They speak Spanish to each other, but spoke Welsh to their mother until she died.
Thus it is that in two weeks in Y Wladfa I encounter no one of my own age whose Welsh was ingested with their mother’s milk. Parents in Trelew who could not speak Welsh to their own children decided to found Ysgol Yr Hendre in 2006, first as a nursery and later a primary school. It costs parents $2,600 a year. But no minority language can survive on private finance alone. To get a clearer picture of the future of Welsh in Patagonia, I need to head west.
Belgique Dernières Nouvelles, Belgique Actualités
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