Montevideo

• 1. Introduction

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  Montevideo stands on the northeastern bank of the Rio de la Plata, capital and largest city of a nation of roughly three and a half million people. On the 13th of December 1939, a wounded German cruiser named the Admiral Graf Spee limped into this city's port after a fierce battle with the Royal Navy and the Royal New Zealand Navy. The ship's captain, Hans Langsdorff, believed he faced a losing fight if he put back to sea. On the 17th of December, he scuttled the vessel in the harbor. Two days later, he took his own life. That episode captures something essential about Montevideo: the city has always sat at the center of larger contests, a crossroads where empires and nations play out their dramas on its shores. What drew so many powers to fight over this particular stretch of coastline? How did a garrison of six families grow into a metropolis of more than a million people? And what does it mean today that this city, rated first in Latin America for quality of life every year since 2005, also hosts the headquarters of the continent's two leading trade blocs?

• 2. A Name Without a Document

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  Boatswain Francisco de Albo, sailing with Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, wrote in his Diario de Navegacion that on a Tuesday in January 1520, he and his crew spotted a mountain "like a hat" rising from the coast of what is now Uruguay. He called it "Montevidi." That single line is the oldest Spanish document to attach any name resembling Montevideo to the landmark now known as the Cerro de Montevideo. From that starting point, linguists and historians have argued for centuries about what the word actually means. The most widespread belief is that it derives from a Portuguese expression meaning "I saw a mount," supposedly cried out by an anonymous sailor on catching sight of the hill. Most experts reject this, arguing it mixes dialects in an implausible way. A rival theory holds that a learned member of Magellan's crew exclaimed the Latin phrase Montem video, meaning "I see a hill"; the rest of the crew, not speaking Latin, simply took it as the hill's name. Colonial maps support this version, showing the Cerro labeled Monte Video in many documents from that period. Rolando Laguarda Trias, a professor of history, proposed a more systematic explanation: that Spanish cartographers numbered the promontories along the Rio de la Plata coast from east to west, making this hill the sixth, or VI in Roman numerals, recorded as Monte-VI-D-E-O. A fifth and stranger hypothesis ties the name to a fourth-century bishop of Braga, Auditus, known in Spanish as Ovidio, to whom a monument was erected in Braga in 1505. None of these theories has conclusive documentary backing. What is certain is that by the founding years of the city in the early 16th century, the name had already attached itself to the region. When Portugal later annexed the territory as the province of Cisplatina, they called it Montevideu, and that pronunciation persists in Portuguese to this day.

• 3. A City Contested at Birth

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  Portugal established a garrison at the site of modern Montevideo in November 1723, part of a long-running contest with Spain over the so-called platine region around the Rio de la Plata. The Portuguese had already founded Colonia do Sacramento across the bay from Buenos Aires between 1680 and 1683. On the 22nd of November 1723, a Field Marshal of Portugal built the Montevieu fort. The Portuguese hold was short. On the 22nd of January 1724, Spanish forces organized by Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, the governor of Buenos Aires, compelled the Portuguese to abandon the location entirely. Zabala initially resettled the site with six families from Buenos Aires, followed shortly by families from the Canary Islands known as Guanches or Canarians. A census in 1724 recorded more than a hundred families of Galician and Canary Islands origin, more than a thousand indigenous people, mostly Guarani, as well as enslaved people of Bantu origin. The city was designated San Felipe y Santiago de Montevideo, later shortened to its familiar name. There is no single founding document. Zabala's own diary, called the Diario, cites the 24th of December 1726 as the foundation date, corroborated by eyewitnesses; full independence from Buenos Aires as a real city came on the 1st of January 1730. By 1776, Spain had made the city its main naval base for the South Atlantic, with authority stretching to the Argentine coast, the island of Fernando Po, and the Falklands. British troops seized the city on the 3rd of February 1807, under General Samuel Auchmuty and Admiral Charles Stirling, only to be forced to surrender on the 2nd of September of that same year when General John Whitelocke capitulated to combined forces from the Banda Oriental and Buenos Aires.

• 4. War, Siege, and Survival

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  By 1843, Montevideo had a population of thirty thousand people, and Uruguayans were a minority in their own capital. Italians numbered 4,205; Spaniards 3,406; Argentines 2,553; Portuguese 659; English 606; and Brazilians 492. That year marked the beginning of a siege that would last eight years, until 1851, a phase of the civil conflict known as the Guerra Grande. The war had its origins in the rivalry between Manuel Oribe, leader of the Blancos faction tied to the National Party, and Fructuoso Rivera, leader of the Colorados tied to the Colorado Party. Oribe, backed by the Buenos Aires governor Juan Manuel de Rosas, surrounded the Colorados inside the city. The defenders inside were supplied by sea, with British and French support, and maintained by a multinational force that included the French Legion, the Italian Legion, and the Basque Legion. Among those who fought in the Italian Legion was Giuseppe Garibaldi; the house where he lived in Montevideo during the 1840s is preserved today as a museum. The Colorados finally prevailed in 1851, aided by Argentine rebels opposed to Rosas. Fighting resumed in 1855 when the Blancos returned to power, which they held until 1865, after which the Colorado Party dominated politics through the middle of the 20th century. The years after the siege brought rapid urban growth. In 1853, a stagecoach bus line connected the city to the neighboring settlement of Union. The Teatro Solis was inaugurated in 1856, fifteen years after construction began. Gas street lighting gave way to electric lights in 1886. By the end of the 19th century, a railway station, a new port, and a network of horse-drawn trams had remade the city.

• 5. Building the Modern City

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  In 1908, nearly 30% of Montevideo's population of 300,000 was foreign-born, most of them Italian and Spanish. That decade's pace of construction was remarkable: new neighborhoods appeared almost yearly, and formerly independent settlements were absorbed into the expanding city. Among these was the economically self-contained Villa del Cerro, once called Cosmopolis, where salt-curing works had built a small industrial economy. The early 20th century also brought sweeping social reforms. Uruguay granted women the right to divorce in 1907, and women's suffrage followed. Construction began on the Palacio Legislativo in 1904, commissioned by President Jose Batlle y Ordenez. It was designed by Italian architect Vittorio Meano. Parque Batlle was formally laid out under an Act of March 1907; the French landscape architect Carlos Thays began the plantings in 1911. In 1926, the Spanish flying boat Plus Ultra completed the first airplane flight from Spain to Latin America, landing in the region. Three years later, in 1929, Batlle y Ordenez himself died. The ground was broken that same year for the Estadio Centenario, which was completed in time to host every match of the first FIFA World Cup in 1930. Snow fell on the city on the 13th of July 1930, during the inaugural World Cup match, one of only four times in recorded history that snow has fallen in Montevideo, with the three earlier instances occurring in 1850, 1853, and 1917. The Palacio Salvo, designed by Italian architect Mario Palanti and completed in 1925, rose to 100 meters including its antenna. It was built on the site of a cafe where Gerardo Matos Rodriguez had written his tango La Cumparsita in 1917.

• 6. Repression and Recovery

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  Uruguay began stagnating economically in the mid-1950s, and Montevideo entered a long period of decline. Political violence intensified from 1968 onward, including the rise of the guerrilla movement known as the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional-Tupamaros. The civic-military dictatorship that governed from 1973 to 1985 claimed a severe toll: from the 1960s through the end of the dictatorship, around a hundred people died or disappeared because of political violence inside Uruguay, and in 1974 another hundred Uruguayans disappeared in Argentina. In the arts, the military junta's crackdown was direct. When the junta took power in 1973, artist Rimer Cardillo used the National Institute of Fine Arts as a center of resistance. The regime shut the institute and removed all of its presses and equipment. Fine arts instruction retreated into private studios run by people released from detention. In 1980, the dictatorship proposed a new constitution. It was put to a referendum, the first vote since 1971, and rejected by 58% of voters, with 42% in favor. That defeat weakened the military's grip and led to the return of democracy. In the 1980s, Pope John Paul II visited the city twice. In April 1987, acting as head of state of the Vatican, he signed a mediation agreement for the Beagle Channel conflict and held a large mass at Tres Cruces. He returned in 1988, visiting Montevideo, Florida, Salto, and Melo. By 2017, after 15 years of sustained economic growth, the city had reached a GDP of $44 billion and a per-capita GDP of $25,900.

• 7. Culture, Sound, and Lore

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  Uruguayan tango took shape in the neighborhoods of Montevideo toward the end of the 1800s, and the city produced some of the most enduring compositions in the form. Gerardo Matos Rodriguez, Pintin Castellanos, and Rosita Melo wrote songs that have outlasted the cafes and street corners where they were first performed. The Fun Fun Bar, established in 1935, is counted among the most important venues for tango in Uruguay. Tango sits alongside candombe and murga as the three principal musical forms of the city. Composer Miguel del Aguila, a native of Montevideo who received three Grammy nominations, has brought Uruguayan tango to international classical music audiences. At the turn of the 20th century, the city earned the nickname "Athens of the Rio de la Plata" for its concentration of writers. In 1900, poets and philosophers working in Montevideo included Jose Enrique Rodo, Carlos Vaz Ferreira, Julio Herrera y Reissig, and Delmira Agustini. The first public library in the city originated with the private collection of Father Jose Manuel Perez Castellano, who died in 1815; by 1816 the library held 5,000 volumes. The National Library of Uruguay, designed in the Neoclassical style by Luis Crespi, covers 4,000 square meters; construction began in 1926 and it opened in 1964, eventually accumulating a collection of 900,000 volumes. Montevideo joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the area of Literature in December 2015. The Carnival is the city's largest annual festival. Although the official public holiday runs for two days, most shops and businesses close for an entire week; preparation begins in December with the selection of neighborhood carnival queens, and the highlight is the Desfile de las Llamadas, a grand parade held in the southern part of downtown.

• 8. A City That Still Shapes the Region

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  Montevideo serves as the administrative seat of both Mercosur and ALADI, Latin America's two largest trade blocs, a role that has prompted comparisons to Brussels in Europe. The building now called Edificio Mercosur, the seat of the Mercosur parliament, occupies what was once the Parque Hotel in the Parque Rodo neighborhood; during the guerrilla years, the Tupamaros repeatedly attacked buildings in that same area. The Bay of Montevideo forms one of the finest natural harbors in the Southern Cone, functioning as Uruguay's chief port and the gateway for most of the country's foreign trade. The bay is anchored on one side by Ciudad Vieja, the colonial quarter where the Cabildo, the Metropolitan Cathedral, and the Mercado del Puerto still stand, and on the other by the 158-meter Telecommunications Tower, the tallest building in the country, designed by architect Carlos Ott and completed on the 15th of March 2000 at a final cost of $102 million after problems pushed the original $65 million budget significantly higher. The 2019 Mercer quality of life report placed Montevideo first in Latin America, a ranking the city has held continuously since 2005. As of the 2023 census, the city proper holds 1,287,452 people, roughly 36.8% of Uruguay's total population, in an area of 201 square kilometers, while the wider metropolitan area holds around 2 million. The city was classified as a beta global city in 2018, ranking eighth in Latin America and 84th in the world. With a projected GDP of $53.9 billion and a per-capita figure of $30,148 recorded for 2022, Montevideo remains the economic engine for a country that, a little under two centuries ago, did not yet exist.