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Click here to see a house in Cwm Hyfryd which appeared on 04 Wal:

Rini Griffiths' home, Esquel

The Green Green Grass of home
 For the second programme looking at Welsh houses in Patagonia, Aled Samuel and Greg Stevenson travelled west to the foot of the Andes, to Cwm Hyfryd, near the border with Chile.

Greg says “As you travel today from the dry desert of lower Chubut up into the lush green landscape of the Andes mountains you can virtually hear the sigh of relief that the first Welsh pioneers must have made when they found this naturally verdant land. Here at last was a landscape that would remind them of home – dramatic mountains, rolling green slopes, and gushing river valleys. And as we discovered, in this natural paradise they built traditional houses that reflected the architecture from back home”.

The dwellings they visited varied from the grandiose to the humble. But as ever with Y Tŷ Cymreig, for Aled and Greg it was the people they met that made the experience special, particularly in this “home from home” that is so far away. It made the long and tiring trip worthwhile, to have the chance to hear some of the descendants of the original settlers conversing in Welsh as their first language.

For Greg, the highlight was visiting Victor Ellis and his wife Delfina in their traditional Welsh cottage, which they were just about to leave for a modern house. “It was an emotional experience and I felt we really caught a magical moment in time in that piece of film”.


Cabana El Condor
Out in Cwm Hyfryd (which translates as “Lovely Valley” - an appropriate name if there ever was one), Aled and Greg visited Cabana El Condor, the ranch home built for the son of Michael D Jones, the man who inspired the colony. This stylish home remains a successful farm to this day, built using the ‘Pared Francesa’ (literally ‘French Wall’) technique that the Welsh mastered in the Andes. Inside, the décor is striking, with a bold use of colours in a straightforward design.

Bryn Amlwg
You won’t find a better example of a traditional Welsh cottage in Patagonia than Bryn Amlwg, the smallholding home of Victor and Delfina Ellis. Here was a house built as the antidote to hiraeth, a simple cottage that doubtless reminded its builders of life back home in Wales. To make it all the more poignant, Victor and Delfina were about to leave their simple mud-walled cottage with its open fire in the kitchen, and sagging tin roof. As Victor said with a tear in his eye, “the house is old and small but its heart is large.”

Bod Eglur
Not far from the border with Chile stands the farmstead of Bod Eglur, now abandoned, but which was the childhood home of Esther and Vincente Evans. Here we see a collection of buildings that reflect the entire architectural traditions of the Cwm Hyfryd Welsh in one location - Pared Francesa, hand-made red bricks, and the log-cabin techniques that the American-Welsh brought with them from Pennsylvania.

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