Patagonia historical timeline

Patagonia’s recorded history begins with a misunderstanding and continues as a frontier.

The name

Magellan’s expedition wintered on this coast in 1520 and his chronicler described the Tehuelche people they met as giants, calling them patagones. The Tehuelche were tall — well over six feet on average against Europeans of the time — and the story of Patagonian giants persisted in European literature for two centuries.

Indigenous Patagonia

The Tehuelche hunted guanaco on the steppe, and the Mapuche expanded across the Andes from the west during the eighteenth century, both adopting the horse with transformative effect. In Tierra del Fuego the Selk’nam, Yaghan and Kaweskar lived by hunting and sea-going canoe.

The Welsh

In 1865 a shipload of Welsh settlers landed at what is now Puerto Madryn, seeking somewhere to preserve their language and chapel life away from English pressure. They nearly starved, were kept alive by Tehuelche who taught them to hunt, and eventually irrigated the Chubut valley successfully. Welsh is still spoken there and taught in schools.

Conquest and consolidation

General Roca’s Conquest of the Desert from 1878 broke indigenous Patagonia by force, opening the land to sheep. The Patagonia Rebelde strike of 1920 to 1922 ended with the army executing hundreds of rural workers.

Tierra del Fuego’s peoples

The Selk’nam, Yaghan and Kaweskar of the far south were destroyed within about fifty years of sustained contact — by disease, by the sheep companies that paid bounties for them, and by missions that concentrated them where infection spread. The last fluent Yaghan speaker died in 2022. It is among the swiftest and most complete destructions of a people recorded anywhere, and the museums at Ushuaia and Rio Grande do not soften it.

Modern

Oil at Comodoro Rivadavia, aluminium, tourism from the 1990s, and a long-running boundary dispute with Chile settled largely by arbitration.