From the Citadel Gate to the Port Market

Plaza Independencia

The city's main square, built where the colonial Citadel once stood, with the Artigas monument and underground mausoleum at its center.

You're standing in Plaza Independencia, the hinge where Montevideo's walled colonial city met the new city that grew after independence. For more than a century this ground was the Citadel, a thick stone fortress that guarded the landward side of the Spanish town. Its walls filled the western half of the square you see now, and its gate stood roughly where the mausoleum steps descend today. At the center, José Gervasio Artigas rides a bronze horse toward the east.

The statue went up in 1923, but the general's remains didn't arrive here until 1977, when the military government built the underground mausoleum beneath the plaza. Walk down the granite steps and you enter a dim room watched over by two soldiers in the uniform of the Blandengues, the mounted corps Artigas joined as a teenager. The palace behind you with the pale neoclassical face is the old Estévez Palace, the president's house for most of the twentieth century. Across the square, on the corner of 18 de Julio, rises the tower that will be your next stop: the Salvo.

Palacio Salvo

A 1928 eclectic skyscraper that was briefly the tallest building in Latin America, built where La Cumparsita was first played.

Look up at the Palacio Salvo, and you see the moment Montevideo decided it wanted to feel tall. The building was finished in 1928 as a hotel for the Salvo brothers, three businessmen who had made a fortune in wool and textiles. It never opened as a hotel. Instead the twenty seven floors were sold off as offices and apartments, a vertical city behind one eclectic facade.

At the time it was finished it was the tallest reinforced concrete building in the world, and briefly the tallest in Latin America. The architect was Mario Palanti, an Italian working in Buenos Aires, and he built an almost twin tower there, the Palacio Barolo. Palanti imagined the two domes as lighthouses linked by a beam of light across the river; the beams never met. Before the tower stood a pastry shop called La Giralda, and in 1917 a young Gerardo Matos Rodríguez first played his tango La Cumparsita on its piano.

Today a tango museum on the ground floor keeps that story, along with the sheet music and a piano from the original café.

Puerta de la Ciudadela

The surviving gateway of the colonial Citadel, moved here when the walls came down.

This stone gate is the oldest piece of Montevideo's defensive wall that still stands where a visitor can touch it. It was built between 1741 and 1780 as the main entrance to the Citadel, the fortress that defended the town from attack by land. Anyone entering the walled city from outside passed beneath this arch, under the watch of soldiers and customs men. When the walls were demolished in 1877 to let the town grow, the gate was taken apart stone by stone and stored, then rebuilt here, aligned with Peatonal Sarandí, the street that was the city's main spine.

Look at the two round towers and the shallow pediment above the arch; this is a military building, functional and stern, but it carries a carved crown and the names of the Spanish monarchs it served. In 1959 it was restored and braced with a concrete buttress behind, and it has been a national historic monument ever since. The opening behind you now is where the whole walk begins to thread into the old town.