Virginia Nissero's Colleagues at Estancia Harberton
Virginia Nissero's Contact Details
Argentina
Estancia Harberton
Virginia Nissero's Company Details
Harberton is the oldest estancia (farm) in the Argentine sector of Tierra del Fuego. Its founder, Thomas Bridges, was an orphan found on a bridge somewhere in England and later adopted by an Anglican missionary, the Rev. G.P. Despard. In 1856, at the age of 13, he was taken with his adoptive family to Keppel (Vigía) Island in the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands, where an agricultural mission station was being established. There he learned Yahgan, the language of the Yámana canoe people from TF, who were taken there for training. By his first trip to Tierra del Fuego, in 1863, he was able to speak with the Fuegians and explain what the Mission wanted to do. He founded the Anglican Mission at Ushuaia in 1870, establishing there permanently with his wife, Mary Ann Varder, and their small daughter Mary, in 1871. In 1884, he received the first Argentine expedition to Tierra del Fuego, which set up the subprefecture at Ushuaia. Two years later, after thirty years with the Keppel and Ushuaia missions, Bridges received Argentine citizenship and a donation of land from the Argentine National Congress under Julio A. Roca in acknowledgement for his work with the natives and with shipwrecked sailors of the Cape Horn area. The estancia he founded, at first called Downeast, is located 40 nautical miles (60 km) east of Ushuaia. It was named Harberton after his wife's birthplace in Devon, England and was the first productive enterprise in Tierra del Fuego (earlier enterprises, such as sealing, whaling and gold digging, were all exploitive). As an estancia, the sheep were gradually discontinued after 1995 as uneconomical. The estancia now has only cattle and is open to the public from October 15th to March 31st, except on Christmas and New Year.