Trevelin

The Welsh had landed on the Atlantic coast of Chubut in 1865. Twenty years later, in November 1885, a mounted expedition of about thirty riders, most of them Welsh settlers, led by the territory's governor, Luis Jorge Fontana, crossed the steppe and reached the valley the Welsh named Cwm Hyfryd, the "pleasant valley." Wheat farms followed, and with them the flour mills behind the town's name: in Welsh, tref means town and melin means mill.

The best known of them, the water-powered Molino Andes, was founded by the settler John Daniel Evans and dates from 1918, the year the town was formally established. It stopped grinding in the 1950s, and today the restored building houses the Museo Regional, which tells the story of the Welsh settlers, their meetings with the valley's Indigenous people, and the colony's farm life.

Trevelin's best-loved story belongs to Evans's horse. On March 4, 1884, years before the mill, Evans, then a young settler, was returning from a prospecting trip when his party was attacked in the Chubut River valley; his three companions were killed, and he escaped only because his horse, Malacara, leapt down a steep ravine bank. Evans went on to help found Trevelin, and when Malacara died in 1909 he was buried a few meters from the family home, now the Cartref Taid museum (Welsh for "grandfather's home"), where the grave can still be visited.

Out on the road toward Chile, the Nant Fach mill is a working replica of an old valley flour mill, with a great wooden water wheel, built in the 1990s by a descendant of Welsh settlers, with a small museum of settler life. And a few kilometers from town, at Río Corintos, the valley's residents met the British commissioner arbitrating the border with Chile in April 1902 and chose to remain Argentine; a one-room museum in the school that stands on the site today remembers the day.

Most visits end at a tea house, over a Welsh tea of scones, homemade jams, and torta negra, the dark fruitcake the Chubut Welsh made their own. Every May the town holds an Eisteddfod, with choirs and competitions in Welsh and Spanish; in spring, from October into early November, tulip fields bloom along the road toward Chile, and the waterfalls of the Nant y Fall reserve are a short drive beyond.

Trevelin is a full-day outing from Carrileufu Lodge, and the south entrance of Los Alerces National Park is about ten kilometers from town.

Trevelin also sits among rivers our lodges fish: Rio Grande, Percy, and Corintos.

Prefer to be based in town? Stay at Trevelin Lodge.