There are 493 blog posts for you to enjoy.
Montevideo: A City Full of Surprises
October 2, 2026
One of the best things about traveling without a rigid itinerary is that a city can surprise you. You arrive with a general idea of what to expect, and then you start walking. Before long, you discover that the city you imagined and the city you're actually seeing aren't quite the same thing.
Montevideo has surprised me several times.
The first surprise is the architecture. I expected old buildings in Ciudad Vieja, some newer buildings in the downtown area, and the usual mixture that comes with a city that has been around for a few centuries. What I didn't expect was the sheer variety. Montevideo's architecture reflects different periods and the influence of the many immigrant populations that helped shape the city. The city's own tourism material points out that the architecture ranges from colonial and neoclassical to Neogothic, modernist, eclectic, and Art Deco. Montevideo also has one of the largest concentrations of Art Deco architecture in the world.
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Piriápolis: Where the Sun Sets Over the Atlantic
September 28, 2026
Piriápolis, Uruguay
Piriápolis is a beach town and has a marina for boats of all sizes including big motor yachts. Piriápolis has a population of around 13,000 but that swells considerably during the summer. This was the first resort town in Uruguay. From the beach you can look out over the Atlantic Ocean to the East, walk down the beach a ways and you'll be looking South, then walk around the point and you're looking due west. That caught me by surprise when I saw the sunset directly due west, and thinking, "Wait a second, I'm on the Atlantic coast, why am I seeing the sunset?" Yeah, it's a rather odd thing - see the sunrise and the sunset from the same location. Piriápolis is a resort town, and it caters to visitors from Europe as well as South America.
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Rocha: Nothing to See Here? Look A Little Deeper
September 24, 2026
Rocha, UY
Rocha, Uruguay has a population of around 27,000. It was founded in 1793. There is nothing special here, nothing to draw tourists, so it is a town you would pass through. If nothing else, you might stop for a meal. Rocha is a pleasant town, a few nice parks and decent plazas, a couple of grocery stores, half-a-dozen ATMs. Rocha never became a major industrial city, a huge port, or a fashionable tourist destination. It remains primarily a regional administrative, commercial and service center. It's generally quiet. But does it have anything for tourists to see? No. But it has something much more unusual: an exceptionally intact example of an ordinary Uruguayan provincial city whose historical urban fabric was never completely erased.
Rocha is not interesting because it contains a few old buildings. The town itself is an unusually intact historical urban landscape. Rocha was planned from the beginning.
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Chuy: Shopping. Punta del Diablo: Beaches. That's About It.
September 20, 2026
My travels through Rocha Department took me to two towns that couldn't be much more different. Chuy sits directly on the Brazilian border and is primarily a place for shopping and crossing between countries. Punta del Diablo is a small fishing and beach town that becomes a major vacation destination during the summer. Neither one is particularly remarkable in itself, but both were interesting enough to deserve a closer look.
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The Quiet Middle of Uruguay
September 13, 2026
Tacuarembó, UY
Tacuarembó, Uruguay, sits in the center of the country. The town was founded with the name "San Fructuoso", after Saint Fructuosus of Tarragona, in 1832. The town has a population of 60,000+ people (as of 2023). The town changed its name to "Tacuarembó" in 1912 when its status was changed from "town" to "city". The Rio (River) Tacuarembó is about 36 kilometers east of town. Running directly alongside the northern side of town is the Arroyo Tacuarembó Chico, a small stream.
This was my second visit to the city; my first was in 2023.
I wrote a blog about it; you can read it here.
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