Patagonia

The empty south, taken by force in the 1870s and still holding almost nobody. Patagonia covers roughly a third of Argentina and holds a small fraction of its people, in a landscape running from the Andes to the Atlantic across arid steppe. It was Mapuche and Tehuelche country, outside state control, until the Conquest of the Desert campaigns of 1878 to 1885 killed or displaced the indigenous population and opened the land to sheep ranching on enormous estates. Welsh settlers, invited in 1865 to preserve their language away from English pressure, founded colonies in Chubut where Welsh is still spoken. Sheep, then oil at Comodoro Rivadavia, then hydroelectricity and tourism have carried the economy. The Patagonian strikes of 1920 and 1921 ended with the army executing hundreds of rural workers. Perito Moreno's survey work fixed the border with Chile, which was disputed to the brink of war as late as 1978. The region holds Aconcagua's approaches, the Perito Moreno glacier and some of the richest dinosaur fossil beds anywhere. Population density is among the lowest outside the poles. The region covers roughly 900 thousand square kilometres south of the Colorado river. Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world. The Patagonian ice fields are the largest outside the polar regions. Cueva de las Manos, with hand stencils around nine thousand years old, is a World Heritage site. Strong westerly winds are close to constant. Bariloche and El Calafate carry most of the tourism, drawing visitors to lakes and glaciers respectively.

• Existed: 1865 CE – present
• Type: Entity