# Heritage & sightseeing Uruguay keeps its history out in the open — a riverside promenade, an art deco tower, two World Heritage Sites. Original: https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/heritage - [Uruguay's coastal lighthouses](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/routes/coastal-lighthouses): Four of five lighthouses let you climb to the lamp room; spread over more than 250 kilometres, a coast to ride in stages. - [Colonia's historic quarter](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/routes/colonia): A World Heritage quarter you can take in over an afternoon: ride in along the waterfront, then walk the Portuguese cobbles. - [The rambla by bike](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/rambla-by-bike): Port to Pocitos along the open river — the classic Montevideo bike ride for a day in the city. - [When streets belonged to children](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/when-streets-belonged-to-children): Twice the archive shows a street handed to children for a day, in 1940 and 1966; a 1942 frame adds swings in a sports ground. - [First came the harbour](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/first-came-the-harbour): Montevideo spent 1901–1909 rebuilding its bay in stone and concrete — and inaugurated the result on a morning marked by a shipwreck at the new entrance. The archive photographed all of it. - [Who owned the street](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/who-owned-the-street): The US street's surrender to the car had a villain; Montevideo's archive shows the same surrender, with no villain found. - [Carmelo and the quiet west](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/routes/carmelo-west): Three hours on the delta boat from Tigre to Carmelo, the only town Artigas founded that still stands, bike aboard throughout. - [Tram, trolleybus, bus: the succession](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/tram-trolleybus-bus): Montevideo's last trolleybus ran in 1992. The municipal company that launched it was wound up in 1976. - [Barrio Sur's two evictions](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/barrio-sur-two-evictions): Ride east from the old town and you pass a seafront cleared twice: El Bajo in 1923–1935, the candombe tenements in 1978–79. - [The Malvín rambla, 1918](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/the-malvin-rambla): In 1917 the bay was bare coast; a year later, horse carts were hauling stone along Playa Honda. How the eastern rambla was built — and what it still lacks. - [Coastal Utopias](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/routes/coastal-utopias) — Ester Zaha: From Carrasco to Neptunia along the Río de la Plata shore — a half-day ride that reads a century of successive coastal utopias written into the landscape. - [Sarandí before the pedestrian street](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/sarandi-before-pedestrian-street): Four stages, one merchant reversal, eighteen years — and before all that, a century of trams and bumper-to-bumper cars. The album of the "before." ## About this section A bicycle is the right speed to take it in. The rambla — Montevideo's waterfront promenade — took three decades to build, section by section, until the Rambla Sur completed the loop in 1935. The customs-house tower above the port was art deco before the style even had a name: its design came out of a 1922 architecture competition. West along the coast, the historic quarter of Colonia del Sacramento has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995, and the former Anglo meat-packing plant at Fray Bentos joined the list in 2015 as an industrial landscape. That promenade accumulated rather than arrived. Parque Rodó got its stretch around 1906. The 1910s did most of the work: Pocitos in 1910, Punta Carretas six years after that; Carrasco in 1912; Malvín and Punta Gorda in 1918. Buceo waited until 1925. Only the Rambla Sur remained, and it proved the expensive one: four kilometres, fifty metres across, 929 properties expropriated to clear the ground. Work began in 1923, a storm undid it, and the rebuilt scheme — engineered by Juan P. Fabini — did not open until December 1935. The ground it took was not empty. Playa Santa Ana and Playa Patricios vanished under the works, and the poor shoreline neighbourhoods behind them — the district the city knew as El Bajo — were cleared to make it possible. Three buildings carry most of the rest. The Mercado del Puerto has stood since 10 October 1868, and for a century it did ordinary work — a produce market, not a destination — until the 1970s turned it into today's grill hall, the one visitors queue for. Liverpool foundries manufactured its iron frame, and it was assembled on arrival. Nearby, Jorge Herrán won the 1922 competition for the customs house against eighteen other entries, aged 26, and saw the building finished in 1931 — Paris would not name the style until 1925. Inland on 18 de Julio, Mario Palanti's Palacio Salvo topped out at 101 metres in 1928; for a time nothing in Latin America stood higher. Not all of it is rideable — Colonia's sixteen cobbled hectares are best walked, bike parked at the gate. The Calle de los Suspiros has actual steps. The Portuguese founded the town in 1680, which is why its street plan argues with everything built after it. Montevideo's colonial core asks for the same treatment: Ciudad Vieja has no cycle lane anywhere inside it, and the whole grid is a 30 km/h shared-traffic zone. Arriving on the protected network and getting off at the edge is the honest way to do it. But getting there, and threading the rest together, is where the bicycle earns its place: short distances, flat streets, and stories that unfold at riding pace. This page gathers everything we've published around that side of Uruguay — how the street [changed owners when the car arrived](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/who-owned-the-street), the coast's [utopian settlements](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/routes/coastal-utopias), the [countryside around Carmelo](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/routes/carmelo-west), and the rambla [then and now](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/rambla-before-and-after).