Montevideo, Urugay

We met with the bus tour guide at about 8:30 this morning for our “Highlights of Montevideo” tour. The city is old and its architecture was clearly influenced by the early European settlers that were artisans in brickwork and masonry. The beauty of the buildings makes the tour very worthwhile. There are many monuments and statues throughout the city, mostly in parks and public squares situated in all the neighborhoods we visited.

The monuments honor military heroes for the most part, but we also saw a beautiful series of slightly “larger than life” size bronze sculptures depicting the early settlers with their ox drawn wagons and horses. Sadly, there was also a bronze grouping of five indigenous people of Uruguay that were said to depict the last surviving “Indians” of the region. Evidently in the 1800’s one of the military leaders decided to force all the native peoples to the northern part of the territory and then proceeded to kill them all. Clearly this is a sad and dark part of Uruguay’s history.

We had a great dinner on ship that night. Later, we had our usual nightcap and reading before turning out the light. During the night the winds picked up and the sea swells began to rise, so we rested, but not completely. I was glad when the alarm clock rang at 6:00 a.m. the next morning so we could get up and get going.