# Crossing the continent

One leg of a longer journey — how round-the-world riders saw Uruguay on their way through.

Published: 7 JUN 2026 · Updated: 4 JUL 2026 · By: Pedaleando Uruguay

Original: https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/community/crossing-the-continent

For some riders Uruguay is not the destination but a leg of a much longer line across South America, and their accounts carry a particular weight: people from Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, France, Japan, Australia and the United States, arriving with a whole continent for comparison, tend to reach the same verdict almost without conferring — flat, calm, easy. The same details recur: the wind, the patient drivers, the mate passed around, the gaucho on the road. So does the friction of the borders — the bridges that won't take a cyclist, the fenced land that makes a night's camp hard to find. Not everyone loves the landscape; some find it plain after the Andes. But nearly all of them land on the people, and on the sense of a quiet parenthesis in a harder trip.

Those who crossed the country inside a larger trip [appear in the full library, filterable by country, language, year or depth](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/community/who-cycled-uruguay?q=South%20America); below, five of the most thorough on crossing the continent.

## 20 km por día — 6,000 km, 317 days

*[20kmpordia.com/300diasenbicicletaporuruguay captured 8 June 2026](https://www.20kmpordia.com/300diasenbicicletaporuruguay/)*

A Uruguayan couple's systematic crossing of all nineteen departments, and every departmental capital but Fray Bentos, over three hundred and seventeen days, done on a zero-budget model: no paid beds, no bought water, welcomed into homes throughout, and deliberately routed onto secondary unpaved roads. It's the rare insider, whole-country account, and the fullest single ride in the directory.

## Sebastián Remualdi & María Eugenia Olives — 4,000 km north

*[portalesdeluruguay.com.uy/es/blogs/imperdibles/como-recorrer-uruguay-en-bicicleta-y-hacer-4-mil-kilometros captured 3 June 2026](https://www.portalesdeluruguay.com.uy/es/blogs/imperdibles/como-recorrer-uruguay-en-bicicleta-y-hacer-4-mil-kilometros)*

A Uruguayan couple's ongoing project, begun in 2020 and interrupted by the pandemic, covering the rarely-documented north — Artigas, Rivera, Tacuarembó, Durazno — along the Corredor de los Pájaros Pintados. Towns roughly every thirty kilometres, almost no elevation, and the strong southern wind the thing to plan around.

## Zoë Agasi & Olivier Van Herck — 1,200 km

*[weleaf.nl/en/a-warm-silence captured 3 June 2026](https://weleaf.nl/en/a-warm-silence/)*

What the Belgians remembered was the welcome: doors opening at nightfall, gauchos in their berets, and — one startling afternoon — a raid de caballos, the long-distance horse race that here runs past eighty kilometres, pounding by on the same road they were riding. Their 2017 line ran border-to-Colonia through Melo, Cerro Chato and Durazno, across country so still after Brazil that the quiet itself became the story; with every hectare fenced and privately owned, a place to camp was the daily puzzle.

## Caryl & Brian Bergeron — 2001

*[outthereliving.com/worldbike/SouthAmerica/south_am_1.htm captured 3 June 2026](https://www.outthereliving.com/worldbike/SouthAmerica/south_am_1.htm)*

The oldest English-language account here, from an American couple already fifty-odd thousand kilometres into a round-the-world tour when they rode Montevideo to [Colonia](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/routes/colonia) over four weeks in early 2001. Day by day they read Uruguay's "European character," the mate everywhere, even the spacing of the electrical poles as a tell for how good the next stretch of road would be.

## Lechu Villalba & Nico González — the Carmelo–Chuy guide

*[deviajealmundo.com/costa-de-uruguay-en-bicicleta captured 3 June 2026](https://deviajealmundo.com/costa-de-uruguay-en-bicicleta/)*

An Argentine couple's route guide, drawn from a three-year South America project, covering the full coastal corridor with packing lists, seasonal warnings and a fishermen's-boat crossing of the Laguna de Rocha. Their companion story of the entry from Argentina is bracingly honest: they hitched across the Gualeguaychú bridge (bikes aren't allowed to ride it), then managed only eighty kilometres in ten days, felled by heat and a stomach bug in Carmelo.