Mexico, Central & South America > Uruguay > River Plate > Colonia del Sacramento > Articles > A Latin Cotswold

The river was like liquid chocolate, brown and thick, the highlands of Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay washing past into the Atlantic Ocean. The Rio de la Plata is said to be the widest estuary in the world and far away, yet only on the opposite bank, Buenos Aires had slipped below the horizon.

Uruguayan immigration cards list ‘health’ as an official purpose of visit and if you come to Colonia from Buenos Aires, as most people do, it’s a reasonable expectation. After a city of 12 million people, the air in the town of 30,000 residents can seem as pure as bottled oxygen. But Colonia is more than an escape from madness. Its old town is Uruguay’s only world heritage site, ranking it alongside the Everglades and Yosemite for world importance.

Colonia was founded by the Portuguese in 1680, and was the only town they established along the river. Its position opposite Buenos Aires was of strategic importance in resisting the Spanish, who created the Uruguayan capital Montevideo in direct response. Disputed and fought over for a century, Colonia was finally lost to the Spanish. The town’s architecture retained its Portuguese origin but was supplemented with Spanish, and later post-colonial, styles. It was this ‘successful fusion’ that prompted Unesco to bestow heritage status on Colonia in 1995.

Colonia has preserved its history, and history has preserved Colonia. Paved with uneven, ankle-twisting cobblestones, and with walls peeling their ancient, multicolored paint, it resembles a Latin Cotswold. The charmingly decrepit Calle de los Suspiros (Street of the Sighs) is like the local version of Arlington Row. Add the terracotta tiling of an Adriatic village and it could be an amalgam of Europe’s cutest moments. Bougainvillea sprouts from walls, and all around are cars that seem to match the town’s antiquity.

At the heart of the town rises its lighthouse, built into the ruins of a convent. I made the spiralling climb to its top, looking down on the town, with its bonbonniere colors framed by the sluggishly brown river. Through the Puerta de Campo, the moated gate into the walled old town, Colonia filtered into the new town, its color diffusing, its masonry modernising as it headed inland, past two hotels that stood strikingly tall against such a low-slung town.

Across the river, Buenos Aires now climbed into view, delightfully removed and straining over the horizon with a skyline as uneven as an old man’s teeth. A ferry returned across the Rio de la Plata. The day was near its end and most visitors were heading back to Argentina, unwittingly missing Colonia’s showcase moment. Sunset. The sun’s daily fall here is so impressive it still draws a nightly local crowd in a vacuum effect. The new town, so busy by day, empties and the old town, until now so quiet, fills with townspeople. It’s a tradition as old as Colonia’s stone work, the timeless passeggiata imported, like the people, from Europe.

Chocolate waves rolled into the seawall on the westward-pointing promontory, while scooters nosed against its other side. People lined the wall, each one carrying a thermos and a mate gourd, the local tea that seems never to leave a Uruguayan’s hand, an accessory as essential as a watch. Atop the seawall the people chatted and laughed, while in the garden of a small museum a group of youths played soccer into the fading light.

As one, we watched the sun tumble into the river, burning the sky orange behind it, its colors electrified by the smog of Buenos Aires. At the last moment the light picked out the tops of Buenos Aires’ tallest buildings, which poked at the sun as though trying to puncture it. Suddenly, the Argentine capital looked like a mythical city, Atlantis rising, and I wondered if this was the real reason why sunset drew such a crowd in Colonia – a Uruguayan celebration as the Argentine capital burned away like mist.

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