Day 21 - Argentina 2025: Around Comodoro Rivadavia

I have to confess that the day did not promise much. Comodoro Rivadavia is an oil-producing region and the main port through which crude is shipped to Buenos Aires for refining and further distribution to the country. For some reason that I don't understand a refinery has not been built here, which in a way has protected the town from being boring to being ugly and contaminated. Well, when life gives you lemons ... so I decided to start my tourist day by visiting the Petroleum Museum. The museum was probably established a few decades ago, and it is beginning to show its age, but there was a very interesting topographic model showing the petroleum and gas producing areas, which confirmed my initial guess that the Mesozoic black shales I first met in Torres del Paine extend in a belt on the back-arc portion of the Andes, from Salta in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south. This belt is the gas-producing region of Argentina, whereas the basin where Comodoro Rivadavia is located is the only petroleum-producing region.

The museum also had a good collection of tools, drilling towers, pumps (what we might call donkey pumps but are here called stork pumps because the up and down of the pump resembles the movements of a feeding stork), and vehicles from the early 20th century, which I found particularly informative. A special valve to control gushing or gas wells that get out of control was developed here, based on the clever idea of smashing the two halves of the valve together, just as if you were clapping your hands. Clever.

My next stop was a visit to the railroad museum, which really had not much to show but chronicles the establishment of a train line between the heart of the fertile region of northern Patagonia and the port through which the ag products of the region reached the port, and from there Buenos Aires or the European markets.

My last serious attempt at tourism was a visit to the Museo Patagónico. To reach it I had to walk through the commercial part of the city, soaking all along the friendly vibrations of the humming town. Nobody seemed to know where the museum was, so I walked and walked until I practically stumbled unto the small museum in the middle of a wide portion of the median of one of the boulevards. Like in many other cases, the museum receives very few visitors and the Director, Anahí, was only too happy to have someone to chat with. Anahí is a historian of the First Nations of Argentina, and she was very happy to exchange tales about the Mesoamerican cultures with those of the Patagonian cultures. Of course I had to tell her about Cantona and my work there in the early 1980's, which cemented our friendship and culminated in an invitation to have a cafecito while she regaled me of tales about the Tehuelches, the Mapuches, and the genocide of the Tehuelches in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego by the "invading" northern Europeans.

I am having a quiet afternoon at home (where fortunately I have free access to Netflix), and tomorrow I will head for Esquel.