The little Gaelic school in downtown Buenos Aires

A cultural night has been organised in the opulent surrounds of the 19th-century Palacio Balcarce to mark World Gaelic Week, with a small school of speakers from the Argentinian capital leading the event to celebrate the language far from its homeland.

The event will also mark the 200th anniversary of the signing of an agreement that opened up emigration routes between Scotland and Argentina. When Scots arrived to embrace new opportunities, those who spoke Gaelic found their language ebbed away amid new social structures.

Today, Gaelic has made a gentle return to downtown Buenos Aires.

In the late 1970s, Guillermo Santana MacKinlay, of Buenos Aires, started to learn the Gaelic spoken by his ancestors from the Isle of Bute, who emigrated to city in the early 1800s.

Using grammar books and tapes - “no internet” - he went on to study for the first time at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig in Skye in 1988. By 1997, he started leading his own lessons.

Mr MacKinlay said: “Since there were not any other Gaelic speakers around me, the only way to get them was to teach them. Many people had no connection with the language or ancestry, and that is amazing.”

His great, great-grandfather James Boyle McKinlay arrived in Argentina with his older brother William Bannatyne McKinlay and by the late 1860s settled in Concordia in the Entre Ríos province. The brothers, who worked in shipping on the Clyde, prospered renting out ships in Argentina.

He said: “I listened to my mother, my family and I got interested, little by little, in my Scottish heritage. This is how I received proudly the language lost when they came here.

“At the time that the Scots came to Argentina, there were other British here - English, Welsh and also Irish - and the only thing that united them in a country that was foreign to them was the English language.”

Mr MacKinlay, a clinical psychologist, added: “People felt they had to leave aside what ever language they had to learn English. That was happening everywhere.

“Gaelic was looked upon as the language of the rural people and something connected to the past with no connection to the future of those living in urban environments.

“That has, of course, changed and that is down to the number of people in Scotland who have worked hard over the past 40 years to raise the image and prestige of the language.”

He added: “It is not that you have to leave aside English, but it is about Gaelic adding another perspective to life. The language is very precious.”

Around 90 pupils have passed through his lessons, which started out as a small gathering of students who sometimes met in his office at night. In 2000, classes moved to the St Andrew's Presbyterian church in the city, with the Ceòlraidh Gaelic Choir founded in 2002.

Mr MacKinlay went on to study for a BA with honours in Gaelic language and culture on Skye and attended his graduation ceremony in 2023.

The World Gaelic Week celebration in Caballito coincides with the bicentenary of the signing of the agreement between the British government and the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, which was made up of countries who declared independence from Spanish rule in 1816. Later, it became the Argentine Republic.

The Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation, signed on February 2, 1825, secured British recognition of Argentine independence. Prior to this, British settlers were not allowed to preach in their own churches given that Catholicism was the religion of state.

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After the treaty was signed, emigration and trade routes opened up - and Scots were among those who arrived.

One of the key ships that sailed from Scotland to Buenos Aires was the Symmetry, a full-rigged ship that departed from Leith on May 20, 1825 with 211 passengers on board.

It safely arrived in Buenos Aires on August 8 that year following a “pleasant voyage” of “great harmony” and landed complete with two babies born on the crossing. According to accounts, the passengers sang Auld Lang Syne before they disembarked.

The journey of the Symmetry came as part of a plan by Kelso brothers John and William Parish Robertson, who, with the agreement of Bernardino Rivadavia, governor of Buenos Aires, set up an agricultural colony for Scottish immigrants on 6,500 hectares of prime land in the Monte Grande area close to the city.

Most of those on the Symmetry came from agricultural communities in the south and south-west of Scotland.

While they transformed the tough land offered and established dairy and arable farms, becoming renowned butter and cheese producers with their goods sold in Buenos Aires, the political conditions in South America led to danger and chaos as civil war with Brazil raged around them. Nine Scots were killed during this period, according to accounts.

The colony had failed by 1829 and the Scots dispersed, some into the city and others to more peaceful rural areas.

Later, a settlement of Gaelic speaker set up in Concordia in the province of Entre Rios, where families with names such as Macdonald, McNeill, Sinclair, Buchanan and Fraser took on plots owned by wealthy landowners, some of them Scottish.

Their minister for many years (1866-77) was the Reverend Lachlan MacNeill, a native of Kilmun in Argyllshire and brother of one of the colonists, who held services in Gaelic and English.

The MacKinlay brothers were among the congregation. Today, their descendant Guillermo Santana MacKinlay continues to honour them - and all the other Scots who came.