Montevideo and Colonia de Sacramento, Uruguay & Buenos Aires Argentina -Week 3 (Colonia and The Paris of South America)
- Jan 17
- 5 min read
Hello Family and Friends,
For our third week in Uruguay we finally explored other locations outside of Montevideo. We took a bus to Colonia, the first city of Uruguay. It has been occupied by both the Portuguese and Spanish.
First things first is that we finally found were the good food is in Uruguay, Colonia. The first restaurant we visited, Resto-Morriña, I literally cried tears of joy while eating the food. It had been almost three weeks since I had a meal that tasted so good, that it made me emotional. For me, good food nourishes my body and my soul.
The whole story behind the restaurant is also just so sweet. The name, Morriña, translated means longing for your home land. The owner of the restaurant is now Uruguayan but spent 20 years in Lugo, a city in Spain. This is where he draws his culinary inspiration and you can taste the passion and heart in the food. This little restaurant was probably the highlight of Colonia and definitely the highlight of Uruguay. The owner even gave us recommendations of other places to eat in town and even restaurants to visit if we go to Lugo. However, of all the places we ate, his food was the best. We did have lunch at this one hotel restaurant that was right on the water and had a great view.
Ok, now that I have thoroughly bored you guys with all my food for the soul talk, we can move onto what we actually saw in Colonia. We toured the refurbished Plaza de Toros Real de San Carlos which was a bullfighting stadium. Not one bull died in this stadium, but not for a lack of trying. As our tour guide put it the matadors were not very good at their jobs. After bullfighting became illegal in Uruguay, the arena sat empty for a century before being restored into the current cultural center.
We also visited the original city gate of Colonia. The whole design of the original Colonia city was to be a defensive port. The majority of the gate is restored. But what is interesting is that it was two local high school students who found the location of the old gate. One day in class they heard about this old city and wall that used to be here. They asked where was it now and became set on finding it. They then went on a decades long journey to become architects and are responsible for the look of the current restoration.
We also visited the "La calle de suspiro" which is translated to "the street of sighs". There are a lot of tellings as to why this street is so named. Our tour guide told us that it is because this is the street where the brothels were located and the sighs came from the women "performing". All the other stories such as it's where women would wave goodbye to soldiers or where prisoners would walk to be hung are just stories that try to erase the history of prostitution.
After visiting Colonia we took a one hour ferry ride to Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is called the Paris of Latin America. Many of its building have a French Renaissance style. I can't really say if it is like Paris as I have yet to go, but it definitely has a New York energy. There is this one street, Calle Corrientes, that reminded me of times square with it's lit billboards and street performers. They also call Calle Corrientes the street that doesn't sleep (sounds like another place that I love).
Besides Calle Corrientes we also went to the "La Boca" neighborhood. "La Boca" translates to "the mouth" and it was the old port. However it was too shallow and so they built another port (twice). This neighborhood is known for being a place where immigrants first came to the city and it's very colorful buildings.
However the neighborhood's most notable claim to fame is that it is where the "football" stadium is located and Messi is it's most famous player. I'm going to be honest, I don't keep up with football (soccer) at all, but I know the name Messi. You may notice in the photo above that there is an image of Messi holding the world cup on the second floor.
We also saw a mausoleum where the remains of José Francisco de San Martín are kept. José Francisco de San Martín is the Argentinean equivalent of George Washington. He is considered the liberator of Argentina, Chile and Peru from the Spanish empire.
Something that has been somewhat of a surprise for me is how much I enjoy visiting these mostly Catholic churches throughout South America. Whenever we pass one I like to stop in for a minute.
Brett and I fully emersed ourselves in the Argentinian culture. We hired a sitter and went to see a tango show. Argentina claims that the Tango was invented by poor port workers. Then it was taken back to Spain where it was structured into what we see as Tango today.
It really is too bad that Argentina's economy is unstable and experiences a good deal of inflation. Though Brett isn't sure how this works, because, Buenos Aires does not look like a city that experiences financial turmoil twice every decade. Also Argentinian's politics are pretty terrible. Both our tour guide and Uber driver told us that the politicians live in the ultra-rich areas (like 8+ million dollars per home) . We questioned why politicians are considered among the the wealthiest as this is what we think of as corporations in the states. Both told us that politicians may not start off wealthy but they always leave wealthy as there is a lot of government corruption. This is a sad fact that eliminates Argentina as a place we could live, but we will definitely be back for a visit. There were so many things that we wanted to do that we just didn't have time to do.
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