Montevideo
— the city that walks the river every evening.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Uruguay sits on the north shore of the Río de la Plata, where the river is so wide it reads as sea. The Rambla, more than twenty kilometres long, traces the coast from the port to the eastern beaches. In the evening, half the city walks it with a thermos and a mate gourd. The old quarter holds the Mercado del Puerto and the Palacio Salvo. The pace is unhurried.
Montevideo, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Montevideo is the capital and largest city of Uruguay, on the north bank of the Río de la Plata. The metropolitan area holds about 1.9 million people, roughly half the country. Founded by the Spanish in 1724 to check Portuguese expansion from Brazil, the city kept its colonial grid in the western quarter and grew outward along a long coastal arc. The Cerro de Montevideo, a 132-metre hill on the west side of the bay, gave the city its name. The port is one of the largest on the South Atlantic.
The Río de la Plata at Montevideo is the widest river estuary in the world, about 100 kilometres across where it meets the Atlantic. The water reads brown from suspended silt carried out of the Paraná and Uruguay basins, then turns slate-blue toward the eastern beaches as the estuary opens. The Rambla of Montevideo runs the city's full coastal edge, more than 22 kilometres, and is the longest continuous waterfront promenade in the world. It is the city's living room from late afternoon until dark.
The Ciudad Vieja, the colonial quarter at the tip of the peninsula, holds the city's oldest buildings around the Plaza Matriz and the Cathedral of 1804. The Mercado del Puerto, an iron-framed 1868 market hall built for the port trade, now houses a row of asado parrillas under its original roof. The Palacio Salvo, completed in 1928 by the Italian architect Mario Palanti, was briefly the tallest building in South America at 100 metres. Teatro Solís, opened in 1856, is the country's principal opera house and one of the oldest in the Americas.