About The Shire

The Old Road Farm is really close to three beautiful and enterprising towns: the largest -- about 30.000 people -- El Bolsón, in the Province of Río Negro; Lago Puelo (Spanish for Puelo Lake, which is close to it) and El Hoyo, in the Province of Chubut, within 12 km (8 miles). In the overall, they offer to the community a variety of services including hospitals and other health facilities, police, justice of peace, a wide educational coverage for primary and secondary school, and a growing offer on higher education, already including degrees in visual arts, music, organic agriculture, professorates in various disciplines, and, starting 2009, a seat of the National University of Río Negro (Universidad Nacional de Río Negro - UNRN) in El Bolsón. They also offer a broad variety of restaurants, bars, call-shops, mechanic workshops, blacksmiths, sawmills, carpentry workshops, supermarkets, and stores covering most of the population's needs.

About 40 km (25 miles) to the south, the village of Epuyén -- close to the homonymous river and lake -- completes the group of towns connected by asphalt road that make the core of the area known as the Andean Shire of Parallel 42nd. (la Comarca Andina del Paralelo 42), which shows an important level of economical and social integration. The region keeps a farming tradition -- which precedes the current growth of tourism -- devoted mostly to the production of berries, jams, conserves and liquors; but also greengroceries, cheeses, meats for local consumption. Hop has traditionally been the local product that reached the highest scale, by providing the main Argentine brewery, but it also gave birth to a local culture of medium and small scale brewers.

El Bolsón has been through time the local center of integration and, in the cultural field, it gathers the creative contributions of the entire Shire, very rich in artistic expressions such as music, plastic arts, drama and crafts. Also Lago Puelo and El Hoyo (Chubut) have begun to set up spaces for cultural expression.

In El Bolsón, a cultural, commercial and social spot that has became a classic even for international tourism, is the varied and colorful Craft Fair, at the public square on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, whose stands offer products ranging from organic groceries up to medieval music, through silverwork, carpentry, clothing, beers, cheeses, wooden toys, musical instruments, and much more, everything done by the hands of local craftspeople and agriculturists. The Fair is at the same time a space for spontaneous social interaction, in which lingers the legacy of the 70's hippy trend. Local neighbors and visitors from places so diverse like United States, Canada, Germany, France, Holland, Israel, Chile, Brazil, Peru, among others, gather there in friendly and open talk. By the way, part of the cultural verve of the region is made of the contribution of immigrants from many parts of the world, in successive waves starting in the beginning of twentieth century and continuing these days. Neighbors whose native languages are French, English or German, among others, are still enriching the cultural verve of The Shire.

About 70 km (44 miles) to the south along a gravel road there is the village of Cholila (Chubut), also close to a homonymous lake, a preferred place for sporting fishing in the world.

El Maitén (Chubut), some miles inside the Patagonian Plateau, offers a landscape of unique and different beauty, and the aesthetics of old times in its classic train La Trochita (The Little Gauge), dating from the beginning of the last century.

On asphalt road, 170 km (105 miles) to the south, the city of Esquel (Chubut) widens the offer of services, including the sky center La Hoya.

To the north (province of Río Negro), out of the urban area of El Bolsón, there are the rural areas of Mallín Ahogado, Cuesta del Ternero, and the villages of Ñorquinco (by gravel road), El Foyel (asphalt) and, after about 130 km on an asphalt road, the city of Bariloche, the most relevant in the whole area, internationally known for its sky centers, which provides with practically any service that any modern city in the world would offer.

On any spot of all this area, visual beauty is comparable only to that one of the most beautiful places in the world. The landscape is diverse in its topography, its forms of live, its forest and its cultural intermingle.