Uruguay

The land east of the Uruguay River, the Banda Oriental, was home to Charrúa and Guaraní peoples and was disputed for two centuries between Spain and Portugal. Portugal founded Colonia do Sacramento in 1680 as a smuggling post opposite Buenos Aires; Spain answered with Montevideo in 1726, a fortified port on the best natural harbour of the river.

After independence movements swept the region, the Banda Oriental was fought over by Buenos Aires and Brazil. In 1825 a band of exiles known as the Thirty-Three Orientals landed to start a revolt, and in 1828, with British mediation, Uruguay became an independent buffer state. The hero of the earlier struggle, José Artigas, is the national symbol; his mausoleum lies under Plaza Independencia.

Civil wars between the Blanco and Colorado parties filled the 19th century. The Charrúa were almost wiped out in the massacre of Salsipuedes in 1831, a history Uruguay has only recently started to acknowledge.

José Batlle y Ordóñez, president in the early 1900s, built one of the world's first welfare states: an eight-hour day, free secular education, divorce, and the separation of church and state. Christmas is still officially called Family Day and Easter week Tourism Week.

Beef and wool made the country prosperous until the 1950s, when decline set in. Urban guerrillas, the Tupamaros, rose in the 1960s, and a civic-military dictatorship ruled from 1973 to 1985, jailing more political prisoners per head than almost any other country.

Democracy returned in 1985. Since then Uruguay has been known for stability and social reform: same-sex marriage and the world's first fully legal cannabis market in 2013, and a grid now powered mostly by wind, hydro and biomass. Former Tupamaro José Mujica, president 2010–15, became a global symbol of austere politics.

About 3.5 million people live here, half in Montevideo. Most descend from Spanish and Italian migrants; an Afro-Uruguayan community, descended from enslaved Africans brought through Montevideo, created candombe, a drum tradition now on UNESCO's intangible heritage list.

Montevideo's Carnival lasts about forty days. Its core is the murga, a satirical choir in costume and face paint that mocks politicians from open-air stages (tablados), and the Llamadas parade, where candombe drum troupes march through Barrio Sur and Palermo.

Football is a national faith: Uruguay hosted and won the first World Cup in 1930 and stunned Brazil in the Maracanã in 1950. Mate is the other constant; people walk, drive and work with a thermos under one arm.

Uruguayans eat more beef per person than almost anyone. The parrilla cooks over wood embers rather than a flame, and the Mercado del Puerto in Montevideo, a 19th-century iron market hall, is full of grills serving ribs, sausages and sweetbreads at the counter.

The chivito, a steak sandwich stacked with ham, cheese, egg and bacon, was supposedly invented in Punta del Este in the 1940s. Italian migrants left pizza, pasta and fainá, a chickpea flatbread eaten on top of pizza.

Basque and French settlers brought the Tannat grape in the 1870s, and it became Uruguay's signature red. Wineries cluster in Canelones near Montevideo, around Carmelo and Colonia, and in the Garzón hills near the coast.

Uruguay is gently rolling grassland with low ridges (cuchillas), cattle and eucalyptus plantations; the highest point is barely over 500 m. The interior is gaucho country of estancias and small towns, with hot springs near Salto.

The south coast faces the Río de la Plata, a vast brown estuary; east of Punta del Este it opens onto the Atlantic. The Rocha coast has dunes, lagoons, the car-free village of Cabo Polonio with its sea-lion colony, and southern right whales close to shore from about July to November.

Most visitors arrive by ferry from Buenos Aires. Buquebus and Colonia Express cross to Colonia in about an hour and Buquebus runs a direct fast ferry to Montevideo in about two and a half; immigration for both countries is done at the Buenos Aires terminal before boarding. Fares climb sharply on long weekends and in January.

Uruguay is expensive for South America. The state softens it for visitors: paying with a foreign card removes VAT on restaurants and car hire in the summer season (about mid-November to April) and on lodging — check the current season's decree. Buses from Tres Cruces terminal reach the whole country in a few hours.

It is among the safest countries in the region, though gang-related crime has risen in outer Montevideo neighbourhoods that visitors rarely see. The coast closes down from about April to November, so season decides the trip.