Colonia Finlandesa, a Finnish colony founded by Arthur Thesleff in mid-1906 in Misiones province in Argentina, has attracted a great deal of interest from historians, social scientists and journalists in Finland. With the help of new empirical data collected from the Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos (CEMLA) database of Buenos Aires, this article aims to look at the following matters: (1) show with greater accuracy the amount, composition, ships and dates of arrivals of the fi rst group of Finns that founded Colonia Finlandesa 102 years ago; and (2) some factors that led to the colony’s demise.