We left Buenos Aires for Uruguay two weeks ago. From BA, there is a ferry across the River Platte to Colonia del Sacramento. Established by the Portuguese in 1680 to firm up Brazil’s southern border, it bounced between Spanish and Portuguese control before ending up as part of Brazil and finally became Uruguayan at their independence in 1828.
The old town is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is stunningly beautiful. There is a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish street planning and architecture: inside the old city walls the streets ramble along and start and stop irregularly; outside the city walls the Spanish colonial style of a regular grid of broader streets and plazas takes over. The old city isn’t very big, but in the Portuguese area the random grid of streets makes exploring fun with little surprises around every corner.
We were in Colonia for four days which let us have a relaxed pace of exploration. Two days was sufficient to see the town and associated small museums. With our extra time we went for a longer walk to the outskirts of town to an old bull-fighting ring that hosted only a few fights between 1910 and 1912 before Uruguay banned bull-fighting. That area was developed as a resort for Argentinians after they banned bull-fighting in 1899. The idea was that Argentinians could take a steamer across the river to gamble and watch bullfights. The bullring then stood empty for a hundred years and has recently been renovated and repurposed into a concert venue.
Our main reason to be in Uruguay is to pick up the car, so after Colonia we took a three-hour bus trip into Montevideo and set up in an Airbnb to wait for the car. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, that plan was a bust thanks to delays at the Brazilian port of Navegentes, so apart from a quick morning of meeting customs brokers and getting a document, our time in Montevideo was free for tourism.
We arrived in Montevideo on Thanksgiving and had intended to set aside a day to make a Thanksgiving dinner with our favorite recipes from home (no turkey, though: too much trouble in a small space and we’ve been eating too much meat). We bought our vegetables at the weekly farmer’s market a block from our apartment and made dressing, sweet potatoes, and brussels sprouts like we usually do and had a late Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. I have a rule that there is to be no singing of Christmas songs until after Thanksgiving, so the celebration is a milestone that Audrey in particular looks forward to each year. She now has the freedom to belt out carols until mid-January.
Montevideo is a fun but very manageable city. There is a long river promenade, distances are walkable within neighborhoods, and we were able to get around easily with Uber and cabs. We went to museums, visited street markets and parks, and walked through the old city. Like Buenos Aires, there are a lot of public squares with elaborate statues or fountains in them and in the older parts of town the architecture is beautiful. I’m not sure how much the kids enjoy being marched around to look at old buildings, but I like it.
One of the things that has struck me during the trip so far is the accessibility of art in general. Art museums are frequently free, there are sculptures everywhere (and not just equestrian statues of famous generals), and murals are common. Even many of the cafes and restaurants still have hand-painted signs and window art.
We also went to the Uruguayan naval museum. In addition to one of the cannons from HMS Agamemnon (present at the battle of Trafalgar, sunk off the coast of Uruguay, it’s easy to forget how global the wars of the 18th and early 19th century were), a good chunk of the museum was given over to the Battle of the River Platte. In 1939, the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee was caught by three British cruisers in the river. While HMS Exeter, HMS Achilles, and HMS Ajax were significantly out-gunned by the Graf Spee, they managed to damage her fuel system to the point where the Graf Spee could neither effectively flee or fight. The Germans took refuge in Montevideo harbor since Uruguay was neutral. The British launched a diplomatic and intelligence offensive: the diplomats took advantage of Geneva convention rules that mandated that a warship leaving a neutral port had to give enemy ships a day’s head-start and had British or French merchant ships sail from the harbor every twenty-four hours to keep the Spee from leaving and give themselves time to assemble more ships in the area. They then had the Uruguayan government expel the Graf Spee as a different portion of the Geneva convention held that combatant ships could only stay in neutral harbors for 24 hours. With the diplomatic pressure on the Germans, the British also convinced the Germans that a large battle-fleet was in place when in reality it was several days away. The Graf Spee’s captain thought he had no chance of escape and no chance to make repairs and decided to scuttle the ship to prevent useless fighting and to keep her out of the hands of the British.
The Uruguayans have been slowly raising the wreck as it is a hazard to navigation, and several artifacts from the Graf Spee are on display. In front of the museum is one of the salvaged secondary guns, and there have been articles recently about the difficulties of dealing with the 800-pound bronze eagle from the stern. It was salvaged, then there were plans to melt it down into a peace sculpture, then those plans were scrapped, and now it is sitting in an Uruguayan warehouse.
After a week, we were feeling the need to get out of Montevideo and do something different (and our stay at the Airbnb was up). Without our own car, we rented a car and headed out into the country, which we will cover in the next blog post.