However, this was by no means exclusively a rural project, many pioneers came from the new, industrial areas of the south Wales valleys, and they found their skills, as railwaymen or miners, worse than useless when they landed at Port Madryn, on the Atlantic shore of Argentina.

They survived - just. Reduced to near starvation on occasions, they were periodically bailed out by the Argentine government. But they persevered and secured a foothold in the Chubut valley, where a river they christened the Camwy cut a narrow channel through the desert from the Andes.

There, the Welsh immigrants made their dream a reality, and the Chubut valley, painstakingly irrigated by hand labour, became a patchwork of farms, all inhabited by Welsh people, their numbers reinforced as further emigrants arrived.

They established friendly relations with the local Indians, not killing or enslaving a single one. The only clash was in 1883 when three young Welshmen on a hunting trip were killed by Indians who mistook them for stray members of the Argentine army, then pursuing its ruthless "Conquest of the Desert" extermination policy against the Indians.

The Welsh had no part of such policies, and often acted as advocates for the Indians against the government in Buenos Aires. They concentrated on building their own utopia: their schools were Welsh, their numerous chapels were Welsh, and Welsh was the language of their local government, which was the first community in the world to grant women equal voting rights with men.

Having outgrown the available land in the valley, they had even founded an offshoot community in the Andes. It was too good to last. However idealistic the colonists' dream of freedom had been, their community was never realistically going to be allowed autonomy by an expansionist Argentine government intent on consolidating its control of the region.

By the turn of the 20th century, with the Welsh having established a European presence in Patagonia, the Argentine government stepped in, said "muchos gracias", took over direct control and extinguished the Welsh people's governmental and educational autonomy. Ironically, this happened just as the Welsh language was being grudgingly allowed into the education system back in Wales where, now, a quarter of all children attend Welsh-medium schools. More...