By Abel Novillo
For LA GACETA – TUCUMÁN
Shortly after the city of San Miguel de Tucumán will host the English captain Edward AndrewsIn 1825, when it was governed by Colonel Javier López, the adventurer and explorer of the same nationality as Andrews, Mr. Woodbin Parish, born on September 14, 1796 in London, who held the noble title of “sir”.
Parish would have been in Tucumán on several occasions, as he himself suggests in his interesting publication Buenos Aires and the provinces of the Río de la Plata, which he published in English in 1839.
A man of restless and observant nature, he had been amazed by the magnificence of the Tucumán jungles; the intense greenness of it, the constant humidity of it. “The enormous amount of plant presence would constitute the feast of any botanist,” he said.
Parish, in the first notes he published about our agricultural wealth, listed the varieties that were abundantly grown in the region, among others corn, tobacco, rice, and wheat, commenting that sugar cane grew wild in the lands of El Bajo. However, supposedly, it is during those years of 1825/27, that in the city of San Miguel de Tucumán, Father José Eusebio Colombres maintained his extra activity, the sugar industry. Those cane fields that Parish identifies as wild would have been those of Colombres, surely in times before the restless priest began harvesting them.
Years later, around 1858, a second enlarged edition of Buenos Aires and the Provinces of Plata would be published, translated into Spanish by Justo Maeso, where Parish expresses glowing concepts about the economic, social and political realities of the Province of Tucumán, including data very interesting of its demographics, with updated references, according to the census, extremely precarious, that Minister Gondra ordered to carry out, where a population in the city of 8,000 inhabitants would arise by 1844.
Parish also mentions the exquisite cheeses of the Tafí region, which already at that time, and even long before that, in the magnitude of time, delighted the most demanding palates, he even highlights that they were “exported” to Buenos Aires , where they had very good acceptance. In this regard, unfortunately, it has not been possible to obtain bibliography that confirms or denies this statement by the Englishman who, without a doubt, was very enthusiastic about the Tucuman bonanzas.
But it is well known, since Columbian times, that the characteristic flavor of Tafí del Valle cheeses would come from the special natural pastures of that region, which is why it was not possible in other regions, and with the same process characteristics, to produce by-products. of milk, with a flavor similar to those obtained in Tafí.
Mister Woodbin Parish was the first British consul in Buenos Aires; He would have arrived on the Argentine coast in 1823, very soon consolidating a close friendship with Don Bernardino Rivadavia. He had an important participation in the first diplomatic treaty with the United Kingdom of friendship, trade and navigation.
© THE GAZETTE
Abel Novillo – Historian and writer.
