Hippie myth in El Bolsón

I want to start by telling you a story; it's something that happened to me a couple of years ago. I was in Chivilcoy, Buenos Aires, at an astronomers meeting. There were schools from all over the country, and, of course, students from the local town who helped organizing the meeting. The last night all astromers would take their telescopes to a huge field, so we could all watch the night sky. During that observation, some friends and I were talking to the host students. They asked us were we came from, and we answered we were from El Bolson. The first comment that came to a girls mind was that people in El Bolson were born surrounded by weed plants. Obviously she had never been here.

It was then that I realised that most people who have heard about El Bolson but haven't been here, have the terribly mistaken idea that it's a place totally full of hippies, weed, peace and love. On another meeting, a younger boy from Buenos Aires wondered if we even had electricity, and imagined it more like a couple of houses far off one from another.

For those who still don't know, El Bolson is nothing related to that now. But why do poeple think it is? It probably was, on it's origins, home for hippies. But the town has decided to grow, and even though it has a vague print of that past, such as being a green place, and a "not-nuclear" zone, it's just another city now. I think this print, this idea of a quiet place to rest, was misunderstood by the rest of the world as hippisim.

So, whichever the reasons. Yes, we do have electricity, we do connect to internet. If you expect to come here and find us all smoking weed, playing with rainbows and talking about peace and love, then don't even waste your time in coming here.

Federico Szmidt