History
For over ten thousand years Patagonia was exclusively the domain of nomadic indigenous tribes , before the arrival in the sixteenth century of seafarers from Spain and rival European powers - Magellan and Drake both visited (and survived mutinies in) the bay of San Julian . The tales related by these early mariners awed and frightened their countrymen back home, mutating into myths of a godless region of giants where death came easy. Two centuries of sporadic attempts to colonize the inhospitable coastlands only partially ameliorated Patagonia's unwholesome aura. In 1779, at a place some 1200 kilometres from Buenos Aires, the Spanish established Carmen de Patagones , which managed to survive as a trading centre on the Patagonian frontier. However, other early settlements all failed miserably: Puerto de los Leones , near Camarones, lasted a few months in 1535; Nombre de Jesus , by the Magellan Straits, struggled for a handful of desperate years in the late 1580s; Floridablanca , near San Julian, was abandoned after four years in 1784; and San Jose on the Peninsula Valdes was crushed by a Tehuelche attack in 1810, after braving it out for twenty years. Change was afoot, nevertheless. In 1848, Chile founded Punta Arenas on the Magellan Straits, and in 1865, fired by their visionary faith in a benevolent Lord, a group of Welsh Nonconformists arrived in the Chubut valley. Rescued from starvation in the early years by Tehuelche tribespeople and Argentine government subsidies, they had managed to establish a stable agricultural colony by the mid-1870s. In the late nineteenth century, Patagonian history entered a new stage with the introduction of sheep , originally brought across from the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas. The region's image shifted from one of hostility and hardship to that of an exciting frontier, where the "white gold" of wool opened the path to fabulous fortunes for pioneer investors. The transformation was complete within a generation: the plains were fenced in, roads were pushed from the coast to the cordillera, and the native Tehuelche found themselves driven from their ancestral hunting grounds onto marginalized lands that were unfit even for the hardy sheep that grazed the steppe in their millions. The populations of the northern hemisphere were clothed by Patagonian wool and fed by Patagonian mutton. Later, the region's confidence blossomed further with the discovery of oil, spurring the growth of industry in towns such as Comodoro Rivadavia . Yet the boom caused by these two boons has collapsed in the last few decades. Jobs are being shed at an alarming rate in the oil industry, and hundreds of estancias, struggling to cope with a less and less viable market for wool and meat, closed or went bankrupt in the 1990s. The explosion of Volcano Hudson in Chile in 1991, which deposited ash over thousands of square kilometres of Santa Cruz Province and killed over a million head of livestock, was the final blow for many estancias. Swathes of land soon lay deserted, devoid even of sheep, and few were prepared to risk losing money in an area which seemed as uninviting to long-term investors as it had to the early Spanish settlers. Fortunately, there are signs that the worst of the crisis is over. The discovery of a major deposit of gold at Cerro Vanguardia near San Julian epitomizes this upturn, while a new-found confidence in the region's vast potential for tourism is spreading rapidly.
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