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In South America, Gauchos Still Ride Tall in the Saddle -- and So Can You

By Remy Scalza
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, September 14, 2008

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.

Gauchos in Evita's Back Yard

In Argentina, hundreds of rural hotels offer a taste of country life, often in lavish colonial estates retrofitted for contemporary travelers. But finding a real ranch -- and real gauchos -- can be a challenge.

"If you want a spa, go to Buenos Aires," says Eva Boelcke, owner of El Ombú de Areco, an estancia just 90 minutes from the Argentine capital that's bucking the trend of gentrified ranches. "That kind of thing doesn't interest me. I don't want to be a Disneyland."

El Ombú is perched on the edge of the vast plains called the pampas, outside a sleepy town where horses graze in the highway median and grain silos dot the horizon. Built in 1880 by an Argentine general, the estancia is, in fact, a legitimate country retreat, with ivy-covered portico, fireplaces in all nine guest rooms and even its own line of wines.

But El Ombú is also a 750-acre working ranch with nearly 500 cattle and 50 horses. This morning, the estancia's 20-month-old steers, fattened from long days of feasting on the pampas, are being weighed and branded.

"It's their last day on the farm," says 24-year-old ranch hand Pablo Castro.

With black locks spilling from beneath a beret and a long knife tucked into his belt, Castro is a dead ringer for Darwin's gaucho. Climbing into the saddle, he sets off after a one-ton bull, wheeling and charging to corral the animal.

"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.

Above all, they were outcasts. Rejected by conquistadors and conquered alike, the gauchos mounted up and took to the plains, living off the land and herding cattle to earn spending money.

"They would ride from estancia to estancia looking for work," Castro says.

With the cattle branded, it's time to break for lunch. Ranch guests (Argentine families, American college students and a group of tango aficionados from Los Angeles) gather at a half-dozen tables set up in the shade of the estancia's namesake ombú, a native tree that towers over the grasslands. Drawn by the smell of roasting meat, a misfit crew of farm dogs paces the perimeter.

Gauchos were notorious carnivores, with a preference for meat cooked asado-style, meaning over an open campfire. Lunch at El Ombú doesn't stray far from frontier traditions. Castro, who doubles as a kitchen hand, ducks into the smokehouse and emerges with a plate of chorizos, spicy pork sausages. Steaks come next, roasted for hours over wood coals. Every few minutes, Castro makes the rounds, serving up more sirloins and short ribs and clearing the graveyard of bones left behind.

In the meantime, 67-year-old farmhand Oscar Pereyra readies the horses for an afternoon ride. "I learned to break horses from my father," he says, throwing a saddle on a brown mare named Luna. Pereyra wears the wounds of his profession: bowed legs and a stooped back from a nasty spill in his 40s. The weight of a prodigious gray mustache seems to pull him down.

In the saddle, however, Pereyra is transformed. After lunch, on a horseback circuit of the estancia, he canters ahead of the guests, eyes slit against the sun, to check on a heifer due to give birth. The birth sac is already visible. Pereyra casts an expert eye on the cow before guiding visitors into the next pasture.

"I left school when I was 11 and started working on estancias," he says, pausing to slap a fly off the back of one of his creased, leathery hands. "I learned everything a gaucho needs to know . . . to break horses, to play the guitar and to throw a lasso." Ahead, two buzzards with bright yellow beaks glare at the horses as they pass by.

After the ride, Pereyra retreats into the stable and reemerges with his instrument.

With guests scrambling for their digital cameras, he pulls up a chair and begins to play. The ballad, about a life lived too hard and too fast, seems to fit him well.

"I've ridden so many miles," he sings in a thin voice, "I can't even remember anymore."

Uruguay: Last Frontier Of the Rustic Estancia

Although Argentine ranches such as El Ombú offer a glimpse of gaucho culture, they are hardly undiscovered. On summer weekends, as many as 150 day-trippers pack El Ombú's patio for the afternoon barbecue.

To experience the estancia less traveled, cross the border into neighboring Uruguay. With rural tourism just blossoming, estancias in this country of 3 million see smaller crowds and still depend on ranching for their livelihood. For travelers, this means fewer gringos, more gauchos.

"The thing about sheep is they're drought resistant," explains Raúl Goñi, silver-haired owner of San Martín del Yí, a 4,500-acre sheep and cattle ranch that attracts visitors from as far away as India and Japan.

San Martín del Yí lies deep in Uruguay's breadbasket, in a rural belt where livestock outnumber people and horses remain a preferred means of transport. Guests at the estancia are put up in a restored 158-year-old ranch house nestled beneath eucalyptus trees. Inside, rustic but comfortable rooms open to an inner courtyard edged with jasmine vines. Hardwood ceilings, fieldstone walls and Spanish tiles all date from the mid-1800s.

But San Martín is no mere country inn. While saddling up guests' horses in the stable out back, Goñi proudly ticks off the ranch's stats: 1,100 sheep, 850 head of cattle and a crew of a half-dozen gauchos to keep the place running.

Today, as usual, there's work to be done. From his horse, Goñi surveys a flock of fuzzy lambs (a veritable sea of bad perms) that needs to be corralled and sheared before the week is out. A group of travelers from the United States and Canada trots behind.

"The gauchos were never what you'd call hard workers," Goñi explains, nudging the skittish flock across a fallow field. "They were loners. They didn't fit into society."

Though romanticized in folk legends, gauchos had a checkered history. By the 1800s, they were seen as criminals and cattle rustlers: uneducated, unsocialized and dangerous. Argentina even passed a vagrancy law to curb their wanderlust: Gauchos caught traveling without working papers were conscripted into frontier militias.

While visitors lope ahead on their horses, Goñi slows to round up a straggling lamb, burdened under the weight of its heavy coat. By now, morning clouds have burned off, and the sun sends up a fine mist from the plains. In the distance, a river of dusty white sheep streams toward the barn.

By midday, with the help of Goñi's eager German shepherd, the flock is packed tightly into the corral. In the barn, a shearing crew of six hired hands sets up shop. All wear the distinctive uniform of the contemporary gaucho: wool beret, knee-high leather boots and loose-fitting bombacha pants (think MC Hammer on horseback). Hand-rolled cigarettes peek out from beneath several bushy mustaches.

The action in the barn unfolds as a gruff ballet. Workers clutch the squirming lambs in a tight embrace while deftly running a pair of shears over the animals' backs, legs and stomachs. With assembly-line efficiency, the woolly flock is denuded and sent blinking and shivering back out into the afternoon sun.

During a lull in the action, Goñi's wife, Cristina Onetto, rounds up the guests, shuttling them through a side door and into an SUV. After tossing a picnic basket in the back of the car, she slides behind the wheel and makes for the gleaming River Yí, just barely visible on the far side of the ranch.

"When I first came here, gauchos were always knocking on our door . . . looking for a meal and a bed for the night," Onetto says. Outside, wild parrots scatter at the approach of the truck, whirling in the late-day light. "I was terrified, but Raúl said they were good people."

The passing years would cramp the gauchos' nomadic lifestyle. Modern ranching, with fences and feedlots, relegated the once free-spirited horsemen to day laborers on the region's massive farms. Still, the name, and the fashions, stuck. Today, in small towns across the pampas, ponchos, parachute pants and dainty berets remain in vogue.

Down by the River Yí, Onetto has set up a picnic table a few feet from the water's edge. While guests take afternoon tea, a tradition from colonial days, an armadillo, serenely indifferent in its prehistoric armor, scuttles by.

"They're nearsighted," Onetto explains. "If you don't make a sound . . . they'll bump right into you."

On the ride back to the ranch, the setting sun sends bands of pink and orange streaking over the hills. Near the barn, quiet now after a long day of shearing, two sleepy dogs mind the flock. The bearded faces of the shearing crew, lit by the red glow of their cigarettes, hover above the darkened Uruguayan plains.

The scene -- gauchos, prairie, twilight -- reads like a page from Darwin's journal.

"The death-like stillness of the plain, the dogs keeping watch, the gypsy group of gauchos," Darwin writes in an August 1833 entry, "has left in my mind a strongly marked picture of this first night, which will not soon be forgotten."

Remy Scalza last wrote for Travel about the tango culture in Montevideo, Uruguay.