Playa Union beachfront duplex

Playa Union is the beach suburb of Rawson, the capital of Chubut, where the Rio Chubut meets the Atlantic after crossing the Welsh-settled valley. It is a real town rather than a resort: a long seafront avenue, a fishing port at Puerto Rawson, a wide grey-sand beach, and a fleet of small boats that take people out to swim alongside Commerson's dolphins — the little black-and-white toninas that live in the estuary mouth and exist nowhere else in numbers like this.

The property is a hundred and twenty square metre duplex on the coast road: three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living-dining room with a sea view, a kitchen, a small patio and a garage. Brick and concrete construction with insulation and double glazing — essential here — gas central heating, and a wind-sheltered north-facing terrace. Sixty metres to the promenade and the sand.

The Chubut valley behind is the heart of Welsh Patagonia: Gaiman, twenty-five minutes upriver, still runs Welsh tea houses and chapel choirs, and Trelew, twenty minutes away, has the airport, hospitals, university, supermarkets and the outstanding Egidio Feruglio palaeontology museum. Puerto Madryn and the Peninsula Valdes are ninety minutes north, which puts southern right whales, elephant seals, orcas and half a million penguins at Punta Tombo within a day trip.

Weather is Patagonian: windy, dry, bright, cool. Summer days reach the mid-twenties and the sea is bracing; winter is around eight to twelve degrees with sunshine and gales. Houses are built for it, and so is the lifestyle — this is a coast for wildlife, fishing, walking and enormous skies rather than sunbathing.

Fishing is serious business here: the port lands hake, shrimp and squid, and shore fishing along the beach for pejerrey is a local institution. Restaurants along the seafront do fresh langostinos for prices that make no sense to a visitor from the northern hemisphere. Argentine purchase procedure applies — an escribano checks title, taxes and liens and issues the escritura, transactions are in dollars, and foreigners buy freely. This is one of the cheapest genuinely beachfront-adjacent houses in a provincial capital anywhere in the Americas.