Patagonia: Matthew Rhys saddles up to explore Welsh outpost in Argentina



I went back to Patagonia in search of Paradise and ended up in a film with the Welsh singer Duffy. When you set out on a journey, you never know what’s going to happen and so it was that I found myself with her in the road movie Patagonia, which explores the Welsh connections with this distant community in South America. I also wrote a book. But to begin at the beginning.



I first went to this Welsh region of Argentina in 2000. My visit came about after an uncle had been there a year earlier to investigate whether we had family links with anyone still living there. Welsh Patagonia - known locally as ‘Wladfa’ (in English: ‘the Colony’) - is on the coast of Chubut Province in the far south of Argentina.

In May 1865, the 447-ton Mimosa sailed from Liverpool to Argentina. On board were 163 Welsh men, women and children who hoped to find a promised land where they could be free to speak their own language, exercise their own culture and prosper.

Land of my forefathers: Actor Matthew Rhys found Patagonia a 'magical place'

Two months later they came ashore in Patagonia, a far-off territory barely claimed by any country and inhabited only by small tribes of nomadic Tehuelche. They faced a barren and inhospitable desert.

The Welsh settlers had responded to a plea by the Argentinian government, which wanted people from Europe to populate the vast expanse of country outside Buenos Aires. (Wales is much used as a handy unit of international comparative measurement, but it seems appropriate to note that Argentina is roughly 130 times the size of the principality.)

Short sharp snack: On his epic trip Matthew learned that armadillos are edible

Despite the passage of 150 years since those first arrivals, the ties between Wales and Patagonia remain strong. There are more than 50,000 Patagonians who claim Welsh descent and they form a vibrant community based around the towns of Gaiman, Trelew and Trevelin. A substantial number of people there speak Welsh.

As a Welsh speaker myself - indeed, I played Dylan Thomas in The Edge Of Love with Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller - I’d always been intrigued by the idea of Patagonia.

When my uncle returned home from Argentina, he suggested I should visit. I was fascinated by his tales of finding Welsh chapels and tearooms and of hearing our mother tongue spoken in shops and schools. I wasn’t disappointed.

When I got there I discovered it was the most magical place. I absolutely fell in love with Patagonia.

I had also read John Murray Thomas’s diary of a trip he made through Patagonia in 1885. It reads like a Boy’s Own adventure and tells how 20 Welshmen, seven Argentinians, two Germans and a few hundred horses set off to discover what they hoped would be a promised land.

And indeed, this group of settlers - known as Los Rifleros - did find their Golden Valley. It was all utterly absorbing. Some 120 years later, a group of men in Trevelin, many descended from Los Rifleros, decided to cover the original trip in its 400-mile entirety.

Cuernos del Paine towers over Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia

Amazingly, they let me accompany them, so I was delighted to be able to return to Patagonia for a second time.

Repeat trip: Matthew recorded the 'old boys' trek to Patagonia

For the next month I helped them to make a video documentary and photographic journal. I spent hours in the saddle, bathed in ice-cold rivers, camped out every night - and I had the best time of my life. I even found out that people can eat armadillos.



The journey allowed me to indulge my fascination with the country. What intrigued me was its place in Welsh history: what it was that made people abandon their homes in Wales to move to somewhere that was basically a desert.



Well, they chose Patagonia because of what they had seen happen to Welsh people who went to places such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Each group went hoping to establish a Welsh utopia, but once they arrived at their destination they quickly lost their national identity as they were subsumed into the local community.

Here in Patagonia, they had the chance to settle miles from anywhere else so that their culture - and particularly their language - had the opportunity to thrive.

Did they have any idea what they were letting themselves in for? Probably not - perhaps the organisers weren’t completely truthful about conditions in Patagonia in order not to damage morale.

The fact is, however, that the colony survived, and today you can visit this corner of Argentina - a sort of parallel Welsh universe in the shadow of the Andes. It’s a strange, wonderful place.

Many people were alerted to its existence by the Bruce Chatwin book In Patagonia, which made his name as a travel writer, and the country’s links to Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid.

Forget the Hollywood story of Butch and Sundance (the film claims that they went to Bolivia). According to the Chatwin book, Patagonia has the actual log cabin built by Butch Cassidy’s own hands.

Chatwin’s book, which helped to burnish my passion for Patagonia, is full of mysticism and mystery. He delights in the survival of the Welsh community with its Welsh schools and Welsh-language teachers.

Jaw-dropping: The Iguazu Falls are on Argentina's border with Brazil

It has been a struggle but they have survived - there’s even a rugby team: the Red Dragons. Joining the old boys on this long expedition across Patagonia, I took photographs and shot video more with the aim of making a tribute to the people of the region.

While I was in Argentina, I happened to bump into old friends, Cardiff director Marc Evans and his actress wife Nia Roberts, as they researched a feature film they were planning to shoot in Patagonia.

Patagonia, which is due to be released here next month, tells the parallel story of a Patagonian grandmother who, with her grandson, returns to Wales to search for the home of her mother, and a Welsh couple doing the reverse trip.

Like me, Marc has a great love of Patagonia. Weirdly, before I went out on my travels I’d met him and he said that he had a couple of ideas for a film about Patagonia.

There’s a chapter in my book where I tell how I’m on my horse in the middle of a great plain when I hear a voice shouting my name. It was Marc doing a recce for his film. We had a few beers that night.

A few years later, which is how long it takes a British movie to be made, we came back to Patagonia and made the movie.

Senorita of the valley: Actress Nia Roberts and Matthew on the set of the film Patagonia

I have to say, it’s a lovely film. I hope it will persuade people from the UK to consider travelling to Patagonia for a holiday. You not only have the Andes for trekking but wonderful wildlife - watching whales from the Valdes Peninsula, or heading down to the nature reserve at Punta Tomba to see millions of penguins plodding up and down to the crashing waves of the Atlantic.

With my work in the American TV drama Brothers And Sisters, I now live in Hollywood and it’s a bit of a shock to discover that despite the success of Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Tom Jones, Wales is so little known in the States.

Some days I’m happy to explain where it is, but when you have to do it for the third time you can get a little frustrated.

That was the good thing about the Ryder Cup being held in Newport last year - I noticed that even Americans were saying: ‘Oh, so that’s where Wales is...’ But generally you get people saying: ‘Is Wales in Scotland... is it part of England?’

I may be settled in LA, but I still call Wales home. And I’m grateful that I’ve had the chance to develop a strong affinity with Patagonia and its amazing people - this is something that will remain with me for ever.

It’s just one of those places. Once you have been there, it gets under your skin.