CHAPTER VI
HEALTHY LITTLE URUGUAY
One cold June evening, with more than a hundred days and eight hundred miles of travel in Chile and the Argentine behind me, I took final leave of Buenos Aires—not without regret, for all its ostentatious artificialities. Or it may be that my sorrow was at parting from the good friends with whom I had been wont to gather toward sunset in the café across from the consulate for a “cocktail San Martin,” one of whom now volunteered to see me as far as Montevideo just across the river—a hundred and twenty miles away. Out the Paseo de Colón the Dársena Sud was ablaze with the lights of the several competing steamers, equal to the best on our Great Lakes, which nightly cross the mouth of the Plata. For the two cities are closely related. In summer Porteños flee to Montevideo’s beaches; in winter the white lights of Buenos Aires attract many Uruguayans; the year round business men hurry back and forth. Aboard the Viena of the Mihanovich Line I watched the South American metropolis shrink to a thin row of lights strewn unbrokenly for many miles along the edge of the horizon, like illuminated needle-points where sea and sky had been sewed together. Wide and shallow, exposed here to all the raging winds from the south, the Paraná Guazú (“River like a Sea”) often shows itself worthy of its aboriginal name in this winter season. I did not wake, however, until the red sun was rising over Montevideo and her Cerro and we were gliding up to a capacious wharf.
It was fitting that my sight-seeing should begin with the little rocky hill surmounted by an old Spanish fortress which is the first and last landmark of the traveling Uruguayan. To the Cerro, barely five hundred feet high, yet standing conspicuously above all the rest of the surrounding world, Montevideo owes both its name and its situation. When the Portuguese navigator Magalhães, whom we call Magellan, sailed up what he hoped might prove a passageway from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a sailor on lookout, catching sight of this little eminence, cried out, “Monte vid’ eu! I see a hill!” On it was built the first fort against the Charrúa Indians, and its value both as a place of refuge and as a stone quarry made it natural that the chief town of the region should have grown up about it. The part the Cerro has since played in Uruguayan history is out of all keeping with its insignificant size; the poems that have been written about it are as legion as the legends which hover over it. It holds chief place in the national coat-of-arms and in the hearts of homesick sons of Uruguay. Never in all the rebellions and revolutions since its discovery has the Cerro been taken by force of arms; never will the people of Montevideo tire of telling haughty Porteños that Buenos Aires has nothing like it.
From its summit all Montevideo may be seen in picturesque detail and far-spread entirety, the point where the Plata, deep brown to the last, for all its sea-like width, meets the Atlantic and flows away with it over the horizon, then, swinging round the circle, the faintly undulating plains, broken here and there by low purplish hillocks, of the “Purple Land.” It is a pity that the Cerro, certainly not impregnable as a fortress, has not been made a place of residence, or, better still, transformed into such a park as Santa Lucía of Santiago. The fashionable section of Montevideo, however, has moved in the other direction, leaving the famous hill, with its garrison-sheltering old Spanish fort and its lighthouse, to squatters’ shanties, rubbish heaps, and capering goats, not to mention the insistent odors of a neighboring saladero where cattle are reduced to salt beef.
In many ways the Uruguayan capital is the most attractive city of South America; as a place to live in, contrasted with a place in which to make a living, it is superior to many American cities. There is a peculiar quality of restfulness about it unknown to its large and excited rival across the Plata, something distinctive which easily makes up for the handicap of being so near a world metropolis as to be overshadowed by it. For another thing, it is nearer the mouth of the river, making it a true ocean port and the most nearly a seaside resort of any national capital in Spanish-America. Built on a series of rocky knolls, roughly suggesting the fingers of a rude hand, the charm of its location is enhanced by undulations that recall by contrast the deadly flatness of Buenos Aires. The old town, all that existed two generations ago, is crowded compactly together in true Spanish fashion on what might be called the forefinger, though it had unlimited space to spread landward. On this rocky peninsula the cross streets are narrow and fall into the sea at either end, for here it is but eight or ten short blocks from the Plata to the Atlantic. On one side is an improved harbor with steamers of many nationalities, on the other is a bay lined with splendid beaches. Like that of its great neighbor, the harbor of Montevideo requires frequent dredging, and its problem is quite the contrary of that in Valparaiso and other bottomless west-coast ports.
Countrymen of southern Chile in May to September garb
A woman of the Araucanians, the aborigines of southern Chile
