Even Charles Darwin was smitten by gauchos.
Notes from his 1833 expedition to South America excitedly describe a rare breed of cowboys discovered riding the open plains, “long, black hair curling down their backs . . . daggers at their waists” and weather-beaten guitars in tow.
For centuries, the itinerant gauchos roamed the South American countryside, toiling on ranches, serenading small-town women and inspiring folk legends about their footloose way of life.
Now, growing numbers of working farms, known in Argentina and Uruguay as estancias, are offering modern-day explorers the chance to experience the gaucho lifestyle for themselves, with a few contemporary comforts thrown in.
“The original gauchos were just wanderers,” Castro explains in Spanish,
lifting a gate to let the cattle back out to pasture. “They didn’t have
a home.” The herd streams past and recedes into the plains. Beyond, a
sea of scruffy grass rolls to the horizon.It was on lonely plains such as these that, in the early 1700s, the
gaucho was born, the progeny of Spanish colonists and local Indians.
The mixed-race gauchos played Spanish guitars but wore ponchos; they
smoked tobacco but also sipped mate, an indigenous tea brewed from a
pampas shrub.
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