Pigüé exists because of one stubborn, generous, and ultimately ruined man. Clément Cabanettes was born in 1851 in the tiny hamlet of Ambec, near Saint-Côme-d'Olt in the Aveyron. He first came to Argentina in 1879 to drill troops, then started the country's first telephone company before falling out with its board and drifting into the wheat-machinery business. When he bought 270 square kilometers of empty land in the south of Buenos Aires Province, the rolling country reminded him so powerfully of his native Aubrac that he resolved to fill it with his own people. With the financial backing of his friend Eduardo Casey, an Argentine of Irish parents, he had the Pigüé station added to the planned southern railway, dug a well, and built a great silo and lodgings for settlers who had not yet arrived. Then he went home to Aveyron to find them.

The name fit the project with eerie grace. Pigüé comes from the Mapuche, the indigenous people of these plains, and means gathering place. To the Aveyronnais who answered Cabanettes's call, it became exactly that. The terms were demanding but fair: each family received two square kilometers to farm for six years, giving half the harvest to the community, after which the land became theirs outright regardless of how the crops had fared. Among the 165 who arrived that first December were a schoolteacher, a blacksmith, a cartwright, a tradesman, and a priest. The very first teacher was 18-year-old Julie Bras, eldest daughter of a family of eight from Aurelle-Verlac. These were not adventurers or fortune-seekers. They were ordinary working people, average age under 25, who had wagered everything they had on a patch of grass they had never seen.

The promised land did not yield easily. The settlers farmed the way they had in Aveyron, but the climate, the soil, and the lie of the land were all wrong, and the first wheat harvest disappointed. The second year was worse: drought ran from March to September, and some families sowed maize and potatoes over the failing corn in case nothing came up at all. Autumn rains finally saved a meager crop. Through it all, not one family gave up and returned to France. Instead, more came. They wrote letters home insisting the sacrifice was worth it, that, as one put it, Monsieur Cabanettes could not be accused of promising more butter than bread. Their faith outlasted the hunger, and the colony slowly took root and, in time, prospered into one of the most successful settlements in the Pampas.

The men who made it possible were not rewarded for it. Cabanettes could never repay Casey, who twice extended his deadlines and finally forgave the debt outright. In the end the provincial government bought back the struggling settlement at the price of bare land, ignoring the buildings and crops, and both Cabanettes and Casey died poorer than many of the families they had rescued. But their gift endured beyond them. Around 20,000 people now live in and around Pigüé, and an estimated third to forty percent of them trace their roots to the Aveyron. Remarkably, many still speak Occitan, the old language of the Rouergue, kept alive across an ocean and a century. Cultural associations link Pigüé to its sister communities in France to this day. The town remains, in the truest sense, a grateful piece of Aveyron in South America.