Yearly, Gauchos (Uruguayan Cowboys) and not gather in Tacuarembo, Uruguay (northern Uruguay) for a huge Gaucho Festival. An entire “camp” is set up around a medium sized lake just outside the city. The camps (in the grounds) are traditional gaucho camps and homes, displaying and demonstrating traditional living. Among other events, there are a parade and a rodeo.
Yearly, thousands gather at the beaches in Uruguay (and Brazil) to give offerings to Yeamnja. The celebrants dug holes in the sand where they placed lit candles, floated various quality of boats into the sea, and made a number of other offerings. Walking the beach in the night can be hazardous during the festival as holes with burned out candles are near invisible in the dark and could easily eat an ankle.
Colonia is a bit of tourist city. Other than tourism, there’s not a lot of reason to be there. It was founded originally to help protect and take over-flow traffic from Buenos Aires. It’s nearly directly across the river from BA. It is also the primary port for the ferry services that cross between Argentina and Uruguay.
Another part of the Prado is a large, outdoor rose garden. Once again, we were a little before prime time but there was no shortage of bloomed roses.
In the far northern part of Montevideo, about a 20 minute drive, is the Prado. Among the many things in the Prado area is the National Botanical Gardens. We were a little before the season for everything to be fully in bloom, but there were a variety of flowers still. There was also a Hawk prowling the grounds.
I let myself get bogged down in processing Carnival pictures to the point where I hated even starting up Lightroom to do the processing. There’s some really nice shots there, but there’s over 21,000 shots total to sort through to pull out the best and then the time to process those. After a break from processing at all, I decided to put those aside and process pictures that had built up after that. I’ve caught up on most of those at this point and have started posting them to Flickr. So, with new pictures on Flickr, there’s new pictures to blog and posts here will start up again.
In the center of Independence Plaza is a very large monument to General Artigas (seen below). Below that monument is a crypt which houses the urn containing his ashes (seen above). The urn is guarded by a special honor guard who you can see stationed to either side in the picture above.
The Port Market is the “tourist” visit in Montevideo. Within the old port market is a collection of Asado restaurants severing traditional Uruguayan food. Between the restaurants are some souvenir shops selling a variety of local crafts and tourist trinkets.
Plaza Zabala is the only fenced park in Montevideo… It has an interesting statue in the center. The relief at the top depicts the town settlers gaining self governance from the Spanish army.
The buildings in old town have a variety of interesting architectural details. This one had a series of face gargoyles set in it’s side.
