Hurling on the pampas: from Mercedes in 1887 to the Copa Almirante Brown

The suburb of Hurlingham, west of Buenos Aires, is home to a club called the Hurling Club. The two names have nothing to do with each other, as the Irish Times has pointed out: the suburb takes its name from the English Hurlingham Club of 1888, not from the Irish game. That is the first myth to set aside. The real story starts earlier, on the sheep lands around Mercedes, and runs through a rulebook now in Croke Park to a Gaelic football cup contested by three countries.

Mercedes and San Pablo, 1887 to 1888

Seamus King and Paul Darby, whose 2007 article in Sport in Society is the standard account, trace the earliest references to hurling to 1887 and 1888, in Mercedes and near the Passionist monastery of San Pablo at Capitán Sarmiento. They say Pallottine and Passionist priests and the Irish schools fed the clubs, and the Irish Times adds that the church encouraged the game to nurture Irish identity and religious practice. Pat Nally lists hurling clubs in Buenos Aires and Mercedes among the institutions founded around the turn of the century, alongside Gaelic League and Sinn Féin branches.

Bulfin's rules, 1900

Organised play dates from 1900 and from William Bulfin, the Offaly-born editor of The Southern Cross. King and Darby give the first official match between constituted clubs as Almagro against Palermo on 15 July 1900, and say Bulfin printed hurling rules in his paper in August 1900 and helped form the Buenos Aires Hurling Club that year. The Irish Times adds a demonstration game on 5 August 1900 at Plaza Irlandesa in Caballito. Wikipedia tells it slightly differently, with a club formed on 15 July and rules printed on 17 August, and has not been verified.

At its peak, the Irish Times says, Buenos Aires had 20 teams, among them La Plata Gaels, Saint Patrick's Mercedes, Fahy Boys and New Lads, and fights between family-based teams were common. The game travelled the other way too: Bulfin's Argentine-born son Eamon captained UCD to a hurling title in 1915, a year before he raised a flag over the GPO.

A rulebook in Croke Park

The GAA Museum at Croke Park displays a 1918 rulebook of the Federación Argentina de Hurling and a medal won by J.J. Kelly in 1925. The museum's caption says hurley shortages forced nine-a-side teams, and that the First World War cut off the supply of ash hurleys.

That 1918 date is one of four. King and Darby put the federation's founding in August 1920. La Nación, in a 2023 centenary feature, dates the club's origin to August 1922, when Irish immigrants created the Federación Argentina de Hurling, and the club, the Irish Government and the Argentine foreign ministry all use 1922; the Irish Times names the first president as James Patrick Harte of Co. Cork. GAA.ie says the club was "established in 1925". King and Darby add that the clubs were reorganised as the Hurling Club in 1946, taking up hockey, rugby and cricket. The dates may describe different bodies, and until the club's own records are read the fair statement is that the Hurling Club traces its roots to 1922, by its own account.

The decline is also dated two ways. Croke Park's caption blames the First World War. The Irish Government's page says hurling was played regularly until the 1940s, when hurleys could no longer be imported, and the Irish Times explains why imports mattered: Argentine ash made poor hurleys, and the Second World War stopped the supply. Either way, the game faded as imported hurleys ran out in the first half of the twentieth century. La Nación records rugby from 1941 and main grounds opened on 25 May 1948; King and Darby note the clubhouse burned on 14 February 1955 and a yearly Hurlers' Day in the 1960s and 1970s.

The revival, 2017 onwards

Gaelic football is the living Gaelic game in Argentina. The Hurling Club fields men's and women's teams that play weekly and has sent teams to the GAA World Games in Abu Dhabi in 2015, where Argentina won the Men's Shield, Dublin in 2016, Waterford in 2019 and Derry in 2023. La Nación counts about 1,700 members, many not of Irish descent, and notes that the president, Gastón López Soler, is the first without an Irish surname.

A second club, Cuenca del Plata GAA, was founded in 2017 by volunteers led by Francisco Lynch and competed at the 2019 and 2023 World Games. Since 2021 it has hosted the Copa Almirante Brown, a one-day Gaelic football blitz in San Isidro. The November 2025 edition was the largest yet, with over 150 players in men's and women's competitions from clubs in Argentina, Chile and Paraguay; GAA.ie names Los Andes de Santiago and Las Arpas of Paraguay among them and counts about 150 active senior players across the two Buenos Aires clubs. San Isidro Gaélico, co-founded in 2018 by local families, plays in the same cup, and one of its founders makes his own hurleys. Ulster GAA twinned with Argentina in 2018.

No regular hurling and no camogie were found in 2026. The hurley shortage that ended the old game has, in a small way, been answered by people carving their own.