When overseas visitors
make their way south to Patagonia, they assume spectacular landscapes and
unfamiliar wildlife, but they’re only rarely thinking of people and culture. From
their arrival in the capital cities of
Buenos Aires and Santiago to
the tip of Tierra del Fuego, they may anticipate encounters with
Spanish speakers, but that’s an oversimplification – like North America,
southernmost South America became a land of immigrants. In Patagonia, Britons
and Croatians stand out, but Scandinavians were also in the mix.
To Argentines,
for instance, all Scandinavians are vikingos
(Vikings), but the term is not always simply descriptive - it's sometimes a
synonym for "slob," presumably for the historic Vikings' dubious
table manners (full disclosure: I myself have three Swedish grandparents and
one Norwegian). Two of Buenos Aires’s most distinctive churches show the
Scandinavian influence - San Telmo's Dansk
Kirke (Danish Church) and the Svenska Kyrkan
(Swedish Church, pictured above) - and both the Danish and
Swedish clubs
have their own restaurants in the city. Legend says the Buenos Aires soccer team Boca Juniors
chose their blue-and-gold colors from a Swedish vessel anchored in the nearby harbor.
In 1902, the Argentine
navy's corvette Uruguay (pictured above, now docked at Buenos Aires's Puerto Madero
and converted into a museum) rescued stranded Swedish Antarctic explorer Otto Nordenskjöld
and his crew, who spent two years stranded on the frozen continent.
Nordenskjöld also explored Patagonia, including the area around Chile's Torres del Paine, where one of the park's largest lakes (pictured below) bears his name.
Coincidentally,
while hiking near El Chaltén (Argentina) in 2009, I met
Nordenskjöld's great grandson Joel, who was paying a second visit to the region
(the first was in 2002, when he and 16 other Nordenskjölds visited Antarctica
on the centennial of Otto's rescue by the Argentines). In the following days,
as his group hiked the "W" route in Paine, Joel pledged to take a
swim in the frigid waters of the lake named for his grandfather.
The
Scandinavians had more than Nordenskjöld’s fleeting Patagonian presence, though.
Outside El Chaltén, Danish pioneer Andreas Madsen’s homestead (pictured above) is now a museum open to the public for
guided tours. And in a remote sector of Argentina’s Parque Nacional Los
Glaciares, between El Calafate and El Chaltén, Hostería
Helsingfors (pictured below) is a remnant
of Finnish pioneer Alfred Ranström’s century-old sheep ranch, but the
surrounding area is open parkland where hikers can reach scenic Laguna Azul (pictured at bottom), which
has its own small glacier.
Though no longer
owned by the Ramströms, Helsingfors (the Swedish name for Finland’s capital of
Helsinki) offers luxury lodgings and other services, with the chance to escape the
crowds at the Moreno Glacier or on the Andean trails near El Chaltén. Because
there’s no public transportation, though, renting a car is the only practical
option for a visit unless you stay here – in which case, the transfer from El
Calafate is free.
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