During our stay in the Argentine, I had had occasion to make various journeys to and from Montevideo, nor was this to be our last sight of Buenos Ayres; yet the occasion was different from all others in so far as it betokened the completion of one stage of our life in South America and the beginning of another, to which we had long looked forward with the pleasantest anticipation, for Montevideo had left on us both a very favourable first impression when we spent a day there on our outward journey.
The dreaded summer heat, which makes life a burden in Buenos Ayres from the Christmas season until the end of March, was just beginning, but good fortune had decreed that we should spend our first South American summer in the airier city of Montevideo. It is surprising how greatly the towns with only some 125 miles of river between them may differ, not only in climatic conditions, but in general character. The peculiar position of Montevideo has given to the place its benigner climate, for it is in the same zone as Buenos Ayres, and the visitor might expect little difference in the climatic conditions of the two cities. Lying on the north bank of the River Plate estuary, at a point where it is difficult to tell, except by the tinge of the water, whether it is river or ocean that laves its shores, the older part of the town is built upon a little tongue of land that thrusts itself into the water, forming westward a very beautiful bay, with a picturesque cone-shaped hill at the western extremity, while seaward a smaller bay indents the rocky coast, and on another tongue of land the more modern suburbs of Ramírez and Pocitos have been built. The old town is thus a little peninsula, and in many of its streets one may look east and west to water. Hence there is hardly a day of the year when refreshing sea breezes do not send their draughts of ozone through the streets. The modern city has far outgrown its original site and extends now in many fine avenues of handsome suburbs for miles around the bay and inland.
The first impression of the Uruguayan capital is that of an essentially European city, clean and well built. Stone is employed to a greater degree in its architecture than in that of Buenos Ayres, though most of the modern structures are of the steel frame and cement variety. The older part is still regarded as “the centre,” chiefly for its nearness to the harbour, and because it contains most of the popular shopping streets, but in reality it is now the fringe, and with the future expansion of the city the centre of social gravity will surely shift a mile or more inland. Here are congregated all the banking establishments, the Bolsa de comercio, the shipping offices, and the warehouses of the large importing firms. Here, too, in the Plaza Constitucion, we find the handsome, if somewhat modest, Cathedral, and the historic House of Representatives, an unimpressive, two-story building occupying the opposite corner of the plaza, its lower story being utilised by the police authorities as prison and court of justice. The Uruguay Club has an attractive building—far finer in every respect than that of the Cámaras—in this plaza, while the friendly English Club looks across at it from its humbler but very cosy quarters on the opposite side of the square, hard by the offices of El Siglo and La Razon.
The streets in this neighbourhood are all of the narrow, colonial kind, and being chiefly paved with stone, the noise of the traffic, together with the continuous passing of electric trams, which run in almost every street and maintain a nerve-racking ringing of bells, is out of all proportion to the amount of business represented. “We are fast asleep here,” is a frequent saying of the self-depreciative natives, and if it be true, I can only suppose they are abnormally sound sleepers, as the noise of the streets, chiefly due to the tramways, might at times waken a cemetery.
When we two Gringos began our summer stay in the city, we chose what seemed to be extremely comfortable quarters in the best-known hotel, occupying an ideal position in the Plaza Constitucion, or Plaza Matriz (after the Cathedral or “mother church”), as it is indifferently called. There on the third story we had a spacious room with balconies overlooking the animated square, and a little writing-room set in a turret, whence the pleasantest glimpses could be obtained in many directions. The food of the hotel (as we knew from previous experience) was incomparably better than anything to be had in Buenos Ayres. Indeed, it is renowned throughout the River Plate district for its excellent cuisine, for which, by the way, its charges rival those of quite expensive New York restaurants, and that is saying a good deal.
Scene in the Parque Urbano of Montevideo.
A Rural Glimpse in the Prado, Montevideo.