The interior

Away from the coast, the accounts change hands: inland Uruguay is a story Uruguayans mostly tell themselves. The scale is national — one project covered six thousand kilometres over three hundred and seventeen days, reaching nineteen of the country's departments and every capital but Fray Bentos; another logged four thousand kilometres through the north. The land shapes the riding: almost all of it is private and fenced, so wild camping gets complicated and a family's hospitality takes its place. The low ridges — cuchillas — pile up climbing you barely notice; the towns are small; the gaucho in his beret still drives cattle down the road, and the mate goes round. It is also where the community gathers in person, at the ENCU, the national meet-up of bike travellers first held at Casupá, in the department of Florida, in 2021 — more than a hundred tents that first year. This is the least-photographed Uruguay, and for many riders the truest.

The rest of the trips that head inland are gathered and can be sorted by depth, country, language or year; below, five of the most thorough on the interior.

A Uruguayan photographer's documentary project begun in 2017, riding some 2,600 kilometres through the country's natural areas with a single puncture the whole way. The framing is territory, architecture and people rather than a day-by-day diary; it was backed by Specialized Uruguay and part-funded by a community t-shirt raffle, and later pushed on toward Rio de Janeiro.

A Brazilian rider's twenty-four-day solo tour in January 2014, entering not at Chuí but over the quieter Jaguarão bridge, then looping Montevideo, Punta del Este, Colonia and the interior. Fully self-sufficient with a hundred and fifty-odd items aboard, he found Uruguayan drivers "remarkably courteous" after Brazil's roads, and fought headwinds and storms the whole way.

A community repository of downloadable GPS routes filed under bikepacking, spanning Colonia, Lavalleja and the country near Montevideo, individual tracks running roughly thirty to a hundred kilometres. It's a planning and navigation tool rather than a story: the interior's unpaved routes, logged by the people who rode them.

The road-touring companion set, the same community-GPS model filtered to touring routes and clustered around La Paloma, Punta del Este and Colonia. Between the two Wikiloc pages, most of the rideable interior already has a track someone has recorded.

The chronicle of the first Encuentro Nacional de Cicloviajeros in 2021, when more than a hundred touring cyclists camped together at Casupá, in Florida, with no hierarchy and a programme of yoga, swimming and campfires. It marked the moment Uruguay's scattered riders became a community; a second edition followed in 2022 at Arequita, in Lavalleja.