The Quiet Experiment
An eight-hour day and legal divorce before most of Europe. The first country in the world to regulate cannabis end to end. A grid that runs above ninety-five per cent renewable in most years. Uruguay keeps proving things are possible and nobody notices, which is roughly how it prefers things.
On a Sunday afternoon in Montevideo the Rambla — twenty-two kilometres of promenade along a river so wide it behaves like a sea — fills with people carrying thermos flasks under one arm. The flask is for hot water. In the other hand is a gourd of yerba mate, which is refilled continuously and passed around a circle of friends, one straw, everyone.
That thermos-under-the-arm is the national posture, and it says something accurate about the country. Uruguay does things at its own pace, in public, together, without needing anyone else to notice. It is the second-smallest country in South America, wedged between two enormous neighbours, and it has spent a century quietly running experiments that the rest of the hemisphere ends up copying twenty years later.
The welfare state that arrived early
The experiments start with José Batlle y Ordóñez, president in the first decades of the twentieth century, who built something that had no equivalent in the Americas at the time: an eight-hour working day, unemployment and old-age pensions, free secondary education, legal divorce at the woman’s request, and the abolition of the death penalty — several of them years or decades ahead of most of Europe.
He also drove the separation of church and state to a degree that remains unusual. Uruguay removed religious references from public life so thoroughly that Christmas is officially Family Day and Easter Week is Tourism Week, and the country is consistently measured as among the least religious in Latin America.
The prosperity that funded it came from beef and wool on grassland that is among the best in the world, and from a moment when Europe wanted both. The country was called the Switzerland of South America, and for a while the description was not entirely ridiculous.
It did not last uninterrupted. Economic decline from the 1950s, an urban guerrilla movement in the 1960s, and a military dictatorship from 1973 to 1985 during which Uruguay held, per capita, one of the highest political prisoner populations in the world. Democracy returned in 1985, and — unlike several neighbours — the country has since built one of the more stable and least corrupt political systems in the region by most international measures.
Three things it did before anyone else
The modern reputation rests on a set of decisions taken in the 2010s that were, at the time, genuinely radical.
In 2013 Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalise and regulate cannabis from cultivation to sale. The stated purpose was not liberalisation for its own sake but the removal of a revenue stream from organised crime. The system is deliberately unfriendly to tourists: buyers must be Uruguayan residents, must register with the state, and access it through pharmacies, membership clubs or home growing, with quantity limits. Visitors expecting a Dutch-style coffee-shop scene find a public-health bureaucracy instead, which is exactly what was intended.
In the same period the country rebuilt its electricity grid. Within roughly a decade, and without subsidies of the scale used elsewhere, wind and solar went from marginal to dominant, and Uruguay now generates the overwhelming majority of its electricity from renewable sources in most years — frequently pushing above ninety-five per cent — with hydro as the backbone and wind as the transformation. It exports surplus power to Argentina and Brazil. The transition is studied internationally precisely because it was done by a small country with no unusual resources, through stable long-term contracts and cross-party consensus.
And equal marriage was legalised in 2013, again early for the region, alongside a broader set of civil rights reforms that made the country an outlier on a continent where the politics generally ran the other way.
A country of three and a half million people keeps proving things are possible, and everyone keeps being surprised, because nobody was watching.
The president who oversaw much of it, José Mujica, became internationally known for donating most of his salary, living on a small flower farm rather than the presidential residence, and driving a 1987 Volkswagen Beetle. Uruguayans are less romantic about him than foreigners are — he was a politician with a record to argue about — but the style was not an affectation, and it fits a country whose central social value is a refusal to perform status.
Montevideo and the coast
The capital holds nearly half the national population and feels like a large town rather than a metropolis. The Ciudad Vieja has the Mercado del Puerto — a nineteenth-century iron market hall now given over almost entirely to parrillas, where the fire is the centrepiece and lunch takes three hours. Art deco and rationalist architecture from the wealthy decades runs through the centre. The Rambla holds the city together.
West along the Río de la Plata is Colonia del Sacramento, founded by the Portuguese in 1680 as a smuggling base opposite Buenos Aires and traded back and forth between the two crowns for a century. Its cobbled Barrio Histórico is a UNESCO site and can be done as a day trip by ferry from Buenos Aires, which is how most people see it and why it is worth staying a night instead.
East along the Atlantic runs the coast: Punta del Este, high-rise and expensive and full of Argentines in January; then quieter as you go — José Ignacio, then the dunes and the lighthouse at Cabo Polonio, a village inside a national park with no road, no mains electricity and a sea lion colony on the rocks, reached by four-wheel-drive truck across the sand. Punta del Diablo at the far end is a fishing village that became a summer town without entirely stopping being a fishing village.
Candombe, carnival and the drum
The other thing Uruguay does not advertise is that it holds the longest carnival in the world — around forty days, running through February and into March, considerably longer than Rio’s.
Its centre is candombe, a drumming tradition brought by enslaved Africans and kept alive in the conventillos, the tenement housing of the Barrio Sur and Palermo neighbourhoods of Montevideo. Three drums do the work: the chico high and fast, the repique improvising, the piano low and anchoring, tuned by fire in the street before playing. UNESCO has inscribed candombe as intangible cultural heritage.
The Desfile de Llamadas — the call parade — takes the comparsas through the old streets over two nights in February, and it is closer to a neighbourhood assertion than a tourist spectacle. It is also a reminder that Uruguay, which frequently presents itself as the most European country in South America, has an African history it spent much of the twentieth century minimising.
The other carnival form is murga: choral groups of a dozen or more performing satirical political theatre in costume and heavy make-up, competing in the Teatro de Verano over weeks. The lyrics dissect the year’s politics in detail, and audiences follow the arguments closely. In a country this small, being satirised by a murga is a form of national recognition.
Inland, where nobody goes
The interior is the part visitors skip and the part that explains the country. It is grassland — the Cuchilla ranges are hills only by local standards — with cattle, sheep, and estancias that take paying guests and put them on a horse.
The gaucho tradition here is a working one rather than a re-enactment. The Fiesta de la Patria Gaucha at Tacuarembó each March is the largest gathering of it, and Tacuarembó also maintains — against competing Argentine claims — that Carlos Gardel, the defining voice of tango, was born there.
And there is the beef itself, which is the one thing Uruguayans will not be modest about. The national herd is fully traceable: every animal individually tagged and registered from birth, in a system the country built to secure export access and which happens to give it one of the most transparent food chains anywhere. Almost all of it is grass-fed on natural pasture, because there is a great deal of pasture and not much reason to do anything else.
Order the asado, take the whole afternoon over it, and accept the mate when it comes round. Refusing is not rude, exactly. But nobody will understand why you did.
Mia has reported from thirty-one Asian countries over twelve years, with a soft spot for the ones without a metro. Her temple-conservation series was shortlisted for the Amnesty Media Award. She travels by night train whenever one exists.