Curious About Patagonia

A place where Welsh had the potential to thrive

Dear friend

How are you? And what do you know about Patagonia?

Did you know that in 1865, a group of Welsh settlers did something remarkable. They packed up their lives, their language and their longing and sailed to Patagonia, carrying with them two of the most untranslatable words in the Welsh laguage; hiraeth and cynefin.

Hiraeth - that deep longing for a homeland that may no longer exist, or perhaps never existed at all - was what drove them from Wales in the first place. You can read more about this story here - A small slice of Wales in South America. However, it wasn’t the romantic wanderlust as I had imagined. These settlers were fleeing something, the slow erosion of their language and culture in their own homeland.

Rev. Michael D Jones, one of the movement’s leaders, believed that Welsh immigrants to America were losing their Welsh identity too quickly, absorbed into English speaking communities. He dreamed of a place where Welsh could not survive but thrive, where children c…