Tea and cake in Wales-by-the-desert

Argentina is not the place you would ordinarily expect to find a thriving enclave of Welshness.

But along the coast of Patagonia eager young Argentines descended from hardy Welsh settlers are taking a renewed interest in the culture of their grandparents and great-grandparents.

Anna Rees is in her early twenties. She was born into one of the Welshest of Welsh families in Gaiman, a small town tucked away in Patagonia’s Chubut valley. Anna is the latest Rees to take the helm at the Plas y Coed hotel and tea room, the oldest such establishment in a town famous for it hotels and tea rooms.

Anna, who teaches Welsh and recently won a scholarship allowing her to travel to Cardiff, where she found several members of her extended family she had never previously met, has enthusiatically taken up the mantle of running the tea shop. Like her grandmother before her, Anna makes the lavish spread of cakes and jams all herself, using ingredients grown in Gaiman’s fertile soils.

The walls of the tea shop are decorated with pictures of her ancestors, some of Patagonia’s original settlers, as well as the expected Welsh flags, dragon mugs and flashing, musical maps of the homeland.

Whether Welsh culture in Patagonia quite matches Welsh culture in Wales is something I’m not qualified to report. At the oldest house in Gaiman, though, I am reliably told by another Welsh descendant that the dialect of Welsh spoken in these parts is “purer” than the Welsh spoken back in Wales. The result of Almost 150 years of isolation, away from the pernicious influence of the English to boot, is a new respect from the homeland for the enthusiastic upkeep of Welsh traditions by the descendants of the Patagonian settlers.

Those settler were tough old souls. Fed up with the English pressuring their way of life, and keen to ensure their traditions and language survived, a small band made their way to Patagonia in the 1860s, founding towns such as Puerto Madryn, Trelew Rawson and Gaiman.

Little by little they succeeded in eking out a life for themselves in the harsh climate of the sparsely-populated land. Railways were built and the Welsh found themselves as key guardians of sections of the line.

Never a publicity-seeking bunch, the Welsh slipped into isolation almost in sync with the demise of Patagonia’s railways. Until the British author Bruce Chatwin found them living in the same way as ever, eating cake and drinking tea behind their net curtains, few knew about the Welsh of Patagonia.

Now things are different. Tourism is a big earner, and competition is fierce between rival tea shops. Coach tours from Argentina and planeloads of curious folk from Wales pop in, especially at Eistedfodd time. It’s easy to dismiss this all as some kind of weird type of freakshow tourism, an outdated oddity.

But people are moving to Gaiman, young Argentines with no Welsh blood in them are learning the language; Welsh women are having Welsh babies.

“I want to help people here know about the Welsh,” Anna says. “No-one in Argentina knows about us, and I want to help them learn about our culture.”

Perhaps the English should take note.