Sports and recreation

Football (soccer) is a national obsession in Uruguay, and the country holds one of the most storied histories in the game. Uruguay first competed at the Olympic Games in 1924 in Paris, where it won the gold medal in football. In 1930 Montevideo’s Centenario stadium hosted the inaugural World Cup, which was won by Uruguay. In 1950 the country defeated Brazil in Rio de Janeiro to become one of the few teams to win more than one Cup. Uruguay has captured more world titles than any other nation, and its players are recruited around the world. Other popular spectator sports include basketball, rugby football, boxing, and horse racing, the latter notably at Las Piedras. Tennis, bicycling, and fishing are also widely enjoyed. Carnival, the most important festival, is held during the week preceding Lent.

Media and publishing

Most Uruguayan daily newspapers are published in Montevideo, and several have national circulations. Many of the major dailies are owned by or affiliated with the principal political parties. El Día was the nation’s most prestigious paper until its demise in the early 1990s; it was founded in 1886 by the Colorado leader and (later) president José Batlle y Ordóñez. El País, the paper of the rival Blanco Party, has the largest circulation. El Observador Económico is a respected independent daily, and many consider the weekly newspaper Búsqueda to be the best newspaper in the country. Two glossy magazines, Tres and Posdata, have raised the print media’s level of sophistication.

Both government and private radio and television stations operate in Uruguay. Radio broadcasting began as a daily service in 1922, and the first television station started broadcasting in 1956. Use of the Internet has grown rapidly since the mid-1990s.

Early period

Before the arrival of Europeans, the territory that is now Uruguay supported a small population estimated at no more than 5,000 to 10,000. The principal groups were the seminomadic Charrúa, Chaná (Chanáes), and Guaraní Indians. The Guaraní, who were concentrated in the subtropical forests of eastern Paraguay, established some settlements in northern Uruguay. The Charrúa moved to the shore in summer to fish and gather clams, fruits, and roots and moved inland in winter to hunt deer, rheas, and smaller game with bolas (stones connected by short ropes that are thrown to ensnare prey) and bows and arrows. Bands of eight to 12 families under a chief lived in villages of five to six houses made of matted windscreens. The Charrúa were known for their ferocity in battle, which they exploited to expand hunting grounds and capture women and children from other villages.

The first European to explore Uruguay was the Spanish navigator Juan Díaz de Solís in 1516, who, along with several of his men, was killed and eaten by Charrúa or Guaraní warriors. Ferdinand Magellan anchored at the future site of Montevideo in 1520, and Sebastian Cabot led a Spanish expedition up the Río de la Plata in 1526, but they found the Banda Oriental del Río Uruguay (“East Bank of the Uruguay River”) unattractive for settlement because of a lack of mineral wealth and the absence of Indians who could be readily enslaved or compelled to serve European interests. Jesuit and Franciscan missions were not established in Uruguay until the 1620s. By that time, however, the indigenous population had begun to collapse, as European diseases killed thousands.

Cattle from neighbouring regions, allowed to roam freely in Uruguayan territory, multiplied over the years until their numbers reached the millions. This process is said to have originated in 1603, when a governor of Paraguay, Hernando Arias de Saavedra, shipped a number of cattle and horses downstream from Asunción and the animals were landed on the Uruguayan riverbank. They were subsequently hunted for their hides by transient gauchos of mestizo ancestry. Groups of bandeirantes (explorers and slave hunters) from Portuguese Brazil also made incursions into the region and occasionally attacked the missions there. In 1680 the Portuguese established Colônia do Sacramento (Spanish: Colonia del Sacramento) on the Río de la Plata opposite Buenos Aires. There they carried on a contraband trade with Spanish settlers, who were collecting great quantities of silver from the mines of Upper Peru (now Bolivia). Spanish authorities countered this move by founding San Felipe de Montevideo as a fortified city in 1726 and attacking Colonia, which subsequently changed hands several times before being ceded to Spain in 1777. Montevideo became the major Spanish port of the South Atlantic, and the process of dividing the Banda Oriental into huge unfenced ranches began. In 1776 the Banda Oriental became part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, the capital of which was Buenos Aires; however, Montevideo was still allowed to send shipments directly to Spain rather than clearing them first at Buenos Aires.

By 1800 there were approximately 10,000 people in Montevideo and another 20,000 elsewhere in Uruguay. About one-third of the total were African slaves, most of whom worked on estancias (ranches), in saladeros (meat-salting operations), and in households. Uruguay’s small but growing middle class included petty merchants, artisans, and military officers of mestizo and European ancestry. At the apex of society were wealthy traders, bankers, estancieros (ranch owners), and high-ranking government officials. Most of the elite originated from—or principally resided in—Catalonia, the Basque Country, the Canary Islands, and other Spanish European lands. Few Indian groups survived into the 19th century; the last large-scale massacre of Indian peoples occurred at Salsipuedes in 1831, and by mid century scant vestiges of indigenous culture remained.