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Montevideo in the CdF photo archive

Old photographs of Montevideo's streets, port and trams, from a city archive that has opened thousands to free reuse.

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.
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.
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.
Uruguay by bike A grand hotel in the dunes Carrasco was drawn on paper before it existed — curved streets, a grand hotel at the centre, dunes all around. Montevideo's coastal corridor took until 1952 to arrive. Five glass plates watched it happen.
Uruguay by bike When the Mercado del Puerto was a market Montevideo's famous food hall spent its first hundred years as an actual market — fruit, meat, dockside trade — with an English-built twin that didn't survive. The archive photographed all of it.
Uruguay by bike Barrio Sur's 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.
Uruguay by bike Tram, trolleybus, bus: the succession Montevideo's last trolleybus ran in 1992. The municipal company that launched it was wound up in 1976.
Uruguay by bike Sarandí before the 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 plate marked free access in the online catalogue of the Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo can be downloaded at full size and reused almost any way you like. The CdF, the city government's photo archive since 2002, put a first batch of more than three thousand high-resolution images into the public domain under CC0 in March 2020, and its terms invite any use: as they are, altered, or as raw material for something new. Material donated to the archive is the exception and follows its own rules.

Those images come from the Fondo Municipal Histórico, a collection of more than 30,000 photographs, most of them gelatin-silver negatives on glass or plastic. It covers Montevideo from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, mostly the centre and the waterfront, and reaches back before the municipality began its own photographic record of the city in the late 1910s. Conservation and digitisation have been under way since 1997.

Each article in this section takes a handful of these plates and looks hard at them. The harbour comes first, with its port works and the Mercado del Puerto; then the waterfront, at Barrio Sur and at the Hotel Carrasco. Several follow the street: who it belonged to when trams, carriages and cars shared it, Calle Sarandí before it became a pedestrian street, the arrival of the trolleybus. One watches children playing in it.

The catalogue record is the place to check what you are looking at. Each plate caption carries an inventory number that leads to one. The record gives the date, which is the cataloguer's and often approximate (the plates here run from about 1880 to 1979), and notes when a plate is a reproduction of an older print rather than an original negative.