Juan José Castelli

The area was originally populated by aboriginals of the Toba and Wichí tribes. Around 1910 a group of colonists from Salta, who had followed the course of the Bermejo River, established there. After the end of World War I, and especially due to the 1923 campaign encouraging the development of cotton crops in Chaco, European immigrants started to come. In 1928 Castelli was founded as an agricultural colony, 100 km north of Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña.

In June 1931, 320 Volga German families arrived, even carrying furniture, tools and livestock. They were around 2,300 who had been settled in La Pampa and the west of Buenos Aires, but were forced to move by bad harvests and economic problems. Cotton cultivation was at the time promoted as a source of wealth. Besides the Volga German majority, immigrants from Poland, Romania, Spain, Paraguay, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Yugoslavia and Ukraine also came.

On 17 June 1936 the settlement was linked to Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña by a railroad.