Napostá

Napostá, about 30 km north of Bahía Blanca, was the destination of some of the Irish emigrants who landed from the steamer City of Dresden in February 1889. The ship had sailed from Queenstown with about 1,770 to 2,000 people, mostly urban poor from Dublin, Cork and Limerick, recruited by bounty agents with promises of land. About 700 were taken to Napostá, according to a 2020 review in the Dublin Review of Books.

Michael Geraghty wrote in 1999 that the colonists were offered 40 hectares a family and a loan of 1,000 pesos at 9 per cent over twelve years, but arrived without their lost luggage to find no houses. According to the National Maritime Museum of Ireland, families went south on 26 February 1889 to La Vitícola near Napostá and lived in tents or in the open, with contaminated water and no medicine. More than a hundred died in two years, mostly children, and lie in unmarked graves. The colony was dissolved in March 1891, and Geraghty says 520 colonists walked roughly 400 miles back to Buenos Aires. The colony's promoter was an Irish-American named Gartland; Geraghty calls him David and the museum Peter.

Fr Matthew Gaughren, an Oblate who had come to Argentina to raise money, denounced the emigrants' reception in The Southern Cross and lived with the Napostá colonists for several months. The affair ended organised Irish emigration to Argentina.