Confusing Colonia

Colonia Del Sacramento, Uruguay


Olivia at the Porton De Campo

So since spending our last day in Auckland, we have hopped on a plane, gone back a day (yes I feel like a time traveler) and arrived in Buenos Aires. From this point onward Buenos Aires will simply be referred to as Buenos, because I cannot spell the last part without triple checking, I have similar problems with Rio. I will be writing about Rio later on in the week as by then we will have completed our time in Argentina. In the meantime however to keep you posted on what we're up to, we had a fun day trip out today. Our day trip took us up to the 14th country we have visited this year (fifteen if we include Italy from last September).

Buenos is located on the Rio De La Plata in Argentina, which serves as the border between Argentina and Uruguay. So we thought we'd take a spontaneous(ish) trip out to Uruguay. We landed in a town called Colonia Del Sacramento. This town is a very pretty old town which looks like it has stepped straight into the world from Portugal. It was a little odd to step from the very English feel of Auckland and then into what used to be a Portuguese colony. The stranger part was that the Porton De Campo (the gateway into the historical town) was actually featured on our guestbook postcards at our wedding, which is pretty cool in my opinion.

The Sea View

Now those of you who are keen on your history/geography may be wondering why I've referred to Uruguay as Portuguese. As it turns out Colonia has a very odd history, it was conquered by Jose De Garro in 1680, for the Portuguese. Then in 1681 as part of the treaty of Lisbon Colonia was handed to the Spanish. For the next 160 years Colonia was handed back and forth between Spain and Portugal. For a few years between 1822 and 1828 it belonged to Brazil after they ceded from Portugal. Until the Cisplatine War when Uruguay gained their independence. All in all Colonia has quite the convoluted history.

This all leads to the interesting town it is today, a historical settlement with some ruins of old Governors houses and a few churches dotted around. Since gaining their independence Colonia has grown to a much larger city, however we only visited the old town where we walked along its cobbled streets and looked out at the sea that surrounds it. In all we had a lovely day out and quite liked the old town feel of it in comparison to Buenos, but that's a different blog.

The Lighthouse in Colonia, oddly the light is red.

We'll write again soon,

Olivia and Andrew

What now?
Have a look at all fourteen countries we've been to this year.
Have a look at our Instagram to see what we're up to now (you don't need an Instagram account to do this).
Location: 70000 Colonia del Sacramento, Colonia Department, Uruguay

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