San Antonio Oeste is a port city in the Argentine

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

 province

Provinces of Argentina

Argentina is subdivided into twenty-three provinces and one autonomous city...

 of Río Negro

Río Negro Province

Río Negro is a province of Argentina, located at the northern edge of Patagonia. Neighboring provinces are from the south clockwise Chubut, Neuquén, Mendoza, La Pampa and Buenos Aires. To the east lies the Atlantic Ocean.Its capital is Viedma...

, and head of the department

Departments of Argentina

Departments form the second level of administrative division in the provinces of Argentina. There are no departments in the city of Buenos Aires, which has so far been divided into neighbourhoods as its administrative divisions, but is to be divided now into communes by a recently passed local act...

 of San Antonio.

The town is bordered by its sister communities of San Antonio Este

San Antonio Este

San Antonio Este is a village and municipality in Río Negro Province in Argentina.-References:...

, to the east, and Las Grutas

Las Grutas

Las Grutas is a beach resort town located in the Argentine province of Río Negro, in the department of San Antonio, with a stable population of 3,500 inhabitant.s...

, to the southwest. Discovered by an expedition of the Spanish Empire

Spanish Empire

The Spanish Empire comprised territories and colonies administered directly by Spain in Europe, in America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. It originated during the Age of Exploration and was therefore one of the first global empires. At the time of Habsburgs, Spain reached the peak of its world power....

 in 1779, San Matías Gulf became the site of an outpost, San Antonio (so named in honor of St. Anthony of Padua). Water scarcity led the original settlement to fail in 1905, leading the community to settle west of the gulf, in what today is San Antonio Oeste.

The arrival of the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway

Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway

The Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway was one of the Big Four broad gauge, , British-owned companies that built and operated railway networks in Argentina...

 in its expansion towards Bariloche in 1910 led to the hamlet's growth. It later became the site of Punta Verde, the leading port for the large wool

Wool

Wool is the textile fiber obtained from sheep and certain other animals, including cashmere from goats, mohair from goats, qiviut from muskoxen, vicuña, alpaca, camel from animals in the camel family, and angora from rabbits....

 export industry of Patagonia

Patagonia

Patagonia is a region located in Argentina and Chile, integrating the southernmost section of the Andes mountains to the southwest towards the Pacific ocean and from the east of the cordillera to the valleys it follows south through Colorado River towards Carmen de Patagones in the Atlantic Ocean...

, though the collapse in the wool market during the 1930s and '40s led to the port's closure in 1944.
San Antonio Oeste benefited afterwards from a growth in tourism in nearby Las Grutas

Las Grutas

Las Grutas is a beach resort town located in the Argentine province of Río Negro, in the department of San Antonio, with a stable population of 3,500 inhabitant.s...

, a scenic cove known for its grottoes. Since 2000, it has also been home to a growing fishing industry

Fishing industry

The fishing industry includes any industry or activity concerned with taking, culturing, processing, preserving, storing, transporting, marketing or selling fish or fish products....

, resulting from the openeing of a deep-water port in San Antonio Este,