Calle de Montevideo

Montevideo began as a military stronghold. In the first half of the eighteenth century the Spanish Crown built a fortified post there to halt the Portuguese advance on the northern bank of the Río de la Plata, and from that walled camp grew the present capital of Uruguay. A repeated legend has a Portuguese lookout crying out monte vide eu, “I see a hill,” on sighting the rise above the bay; scholars doubt it and point to a plain cartographic note. The street belongs to a group in Cuatro Caminos named after American capitals and countries. Today it is a short, residential stretch, far from the bustle of Bravo Murillo, where you unknowingly tread the memory of a fortress that once watched over an estuary ten thousand kilometers away.