A Year in Uruguay

While I intended to visit Uruguay's National Museum of Art shortly after I went to the Museo Torres-García, I never made it during the entire year I lived in Montevideo.

Partly because I didn't notice it.

My mental image of an art museum is a grand classical building like the Art Institute of Chicago or the west wing of the National Gallery of Art or else I imagine something impressively modern like the National Gallery's east wing or the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

The Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales is located in Parque Rodó and I'd parked right next to it dozens of times without knowing it. The architecture reminded me of an elementary school. The courtyard was usually full of kids in their school tunicas which reinforced the impression. I didn't realize it was a museum.




During our vacation in Uruguay this year, I made up for my past omission by making the museum a priority.

The museum is small, about the size of my local art museum, and all the exhibits can be seen in about an hour. When we visited in July, they had a visiting exhibit of works by Spanish artist Joan Miró and a large exhibit by a Uruguayan artist in the style of Torres-García, in addition to works from their permanent collection.


Admission: free.
Tuesday-Sunday 12:00-6:00 pm

Labels: art, Montevideo places, museums, Uruguay

I'd wanted to visit the Museo del Carnaval before we left Montevideo in mid-2007 but its opening date kept getting postponed, so I was happy when we were able to see it on this trip. It has a great location right next to the Mercado del Puerto, making it a very convenient stop for visitors.

Like many of Montevideo's museums, it's small and it doesn't take more than a few minutes to see all of the exhibits. While it certainly isn't the same as hearing a murga or candombe group live, it brought back great memories of carnival. The best part was the hall of colorful murga costumes.

The Museo del Carnaval blog is interesting (in Spanish with lots of photos) and on YouTube there's a comprehensive video showing the creation of the museum.

Open Tuesday-Sunday
Free admission

Labels: carnival, Montevideo places, museums, Uruguay

The Museo Naval is a small museum in Montevideo located on the waterfront between Pocitos beach and Buceo's harbor. It has two rooms packed with models and artifacts of Uruguay's navy. Perhaps the most impressive piece is the big 150mm gun from the Graf Spee displayed outside the building.

Admission is free. Closed Thursdays.

Labels: Montevideo places, museums, Uruguay, waterfront

The Museo del Gaucho and the Museo de la Moneda occupy separate floors in the same late-nineteenth century mansion in Montevideo's Centro, so you get two museums for one price-- free. Both collections are fairly small but interesting.

The gaucho museum showcases the elaborate silverwork used by the caballeros on saddles, belts, knives, whips, and bridles. It also displays weapons, mates, canteens made from horns, and traditional clothing of the countryside.

As an economist, I was fascinated by the display of currency from the early 1990s. Those bills looked just like the ones in circulation today but they had a lot more zeros: today's 20 peso note was 20,000 nuevo pesos at that time. All the bills kept the same design: colors, portrait, artwork but with three fewer zeros. Another display case had currency from the 1970s before the introduction of the nuevo peso-- and again those bills had an extra 3 zeros. My favorite was this one where they changed a 5000 peso note to a 5 nuevo peso note using a rubber stamp.

As a result of these currency changes, today's 1 peso coin represents one million old pesos. This made the old pesos (through the 1970s) and the nuevo pesos (through the early 1990s) essentially worthless. (I have seen people use them as chips when playing truco and the Almacén del Hacha has jars full of them as decoration.) Why? Uruguay, like other countries in the region, experienced runaway inflation.

If you're not interested in money or gauchos, you might still enjoy visiting the museum to see the elaborate housing that Uruguay's elite enjoyed a century ago.

Avenida 18 de Julio 998. Open Monday-Friday 10 am - 5 pm. Free.

Labels: economics, Montevideo places, museums, Uruguay

This branch of the National Historic Museum is in Montevideo's Cuidad Vieja a few blocks from the Palacio Taranco and the Plaza Zabala. It's the former home of General Fructoso Rivera, the first president of the Uruguayan republic and the founder of the Colorado Party. Inside, there are big paintings of generals and soldiers and displays of swords and guns from the period .

Open afternoons: Tuesday-Friday & Sunday. Address: Rincón 437. Free admission.

Labels: Montevideo places, museums, Uruguay

The Palacio Taranco (Museo de Artes Decorativas) is an early twentieth century mansion near Plaza Zabala. The high ceilinged rooms (nearly 20 feet high) are full of ornate furniture and paintings from the period. Even the window latches are intricate. Unfortunately, they prohibit photography inside the building, but you can see a few photos on their website. The basement (accessible from an unmarked door in the entryway) has a collection of archaeological findings from Italy.

It makes a nice stop if you're walking from the Mercado del Puerto to the Peatonal Sarandí. Open Tuesday-Sunday afternoons. Free.

Labels: Montevideo places, museums, Uruguay

The Museo de Arte Precolombino e Indigena (MAPI) is in a magnificent old building in Montevideo's Ciudad Vieja. The upper floors are still being restored so currently there are only limited exhibits on the ground floor. It's worth going in to see the turn-of-the-century architectural detail. Admission is Free. Open Tuesday-Saturday afternoons.

Labels: Montevideo places, museums, Uruguay

The Museo del Azulejo is a small museum in the Pocitos neighborhood [address: Cavia 3080] featuring a collection of over 3000 decorative tiles. Azulejos have an interesting history, going back to the era of Moorish rule in the Iberian peninsula. (The word azulejo comes from an Arabic phrase meaning polished stone.) The tiles arrived in the Americas with Spanish and Portuguese settlers. Azulejos aren't nearly as popular in Montevideo as they are in Seville but there are some interesting examples here.

The museum has 5 or 6 rooms in a neat old house displaying tiles from various countries. It's open Tuesday-Sunday afternoons and admission is free.

Labels: Montevideo places, museums, Uruguay

Joaquín Torres García was one of Uruguay's most important painters. He had a long career, working in Brussels, Paris, Barcelona, New York, Madrid, and Montevideo. The Torres Garcia Museum is in Montevideo, near the Plaza Independencia on the Sarandi pedestrian mall. It's a fairly small museum with galleries on three floors. It's interesting to see how the style of his paintings changed over time .

His paintings are also displayed at El Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales. The piece I've seen reproduced most frequently on Uruguayan handicrafts is this simple drawing.

Labels: Montevideo places, museums, Uruguay