# Uruguay by bike How a small country is taking to the bicycle — the slow-cycling idea behind this site, and the city learning to ride. Original: https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike Uruguay by bike ## The Malvín rambla, 1918: stone carts, a bridge, and a resort that became a barrio 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. - [Canelones opens a short pedestrian seafront path and announces one to Atlántida](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/atlantida-seafront-path) - [Montevideo prepares Rondeau for the first stretch of its west-side cycleway](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/west-cycleway-works-begin) - [When streets belonged to children](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/when-streets-belonged-to-children) - [Cycling and public health in Uruguay](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/cycling-and-public-health) - [Tram, trolleybus, bus: AMDET and the vehicles that ran Montevideo](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. - [Uruguay's departments approve a common e-scooter rule: what changes in Montevideo, and what doesn't](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/e-scooter-rules): Uruguay's departmental governments unanimously approved a national e-scooter ordinance on 24 September 2026. As of 3 October, Montevideo's 2019 decree still applied. - [Berlin, where shared mobility runs its experiments](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/postcards/berlin) — Adam Mallat: Scooters, mopeds, subscription bikes and free cargo bikes on the same blocks: notes from the city that counts it all. - [Rodala, Ciudad Vieja's bicycle clubhouse](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/rodala): The warehouse where Montevideo's bike scene is building itself a home. - [The MusiMóvil: Montevideo's rolling sound system and the pack that follows it](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/musimovil): The neon-crowned trike that became the soundtrack of Montevideo's group rides. - [The man with the infinity sign](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/community/pedro): He put Montevideo's music on wheels. Now he's giving it an address. - [Slow cycle-touring — what it means here](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/slow-cycling): A bicycle as a way of knowing a place at the right speed, not a machine for going fast, and why Uruguay suits the practice. - [The economics of bike lanes: what the studies show, and what Montevideo has counted](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/bike-lane-economics): Elsewhere the firmer case is in jobs, health and benefit-cost studies; for Montevideo's two lanes, only the cost is on record. - [Montevideo's first bicycle boom: the fever of 1899 and what it left behind](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/montevideo-first-bicycle-boom): Clubs, wooden tracks, an import spike with a hangover, and the cycling lobby that invented Uruguay's road signs. - [Sarandí before the pedestrian street: a century of traffic, and the eighteen-year fight that ended it](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." - [Barrio Sur's two evictions: what Montevideo's seafront was built over](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. - [A French contract, a lead box under a breakwater, and the port that made modern Montevideo](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. - [The Rambla, before and after: what thirty years changed — and didn't](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/rambla-before-and-after): Same granite wall, same light at dusk, little change for decades, until 2024, when one stretch took a lane away from the car. - [Montevideo is learning to ride](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/montevideo): The everyday cycling city — the Rambla, the new protected lanes, and what the numbers say about where Montevideo is heading. - [Montevideo's cycling policy, measured against Buenos Aires and Santiago](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/cycling-policy): A sourced look at what Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Santiago have actually built, and the one piece Montevideo is still missing. - [The rambla by bike: Montevideo from the port to Pocitos](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. - [Montevideo's cycling calendar](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/events): Group rides, races, outings and talks around Montevideo, updated with every event confirmed. - [Anti-theft basics: locks and where not to leave the bike](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/anti-theft): No lock stops a determined thief. The point is to be more trouble to steal than the bike chained up beside yours. ## Montevideo's bike lanes, on a map Network data: [Intendencia de Montevideo](https://montevideo.gub.uy/area-tematica/movilidad/montevideo-en-bici-0). ## About this section This is the city-and-culture side of Pedaleando Uruguay. It holds the idea the whole site is built on — that the bicycle, ridden at a civilian pace, is the best instrument for reading a place: slow enough to notice, fast enough to cover ground. The idea has a local pedigree. Between 1904 and 1909 the bulletin of Montevideo's Club Nacional de Velocipedistas argued that the tourist who pedals an unhurried twelve kilometres an hour has time to see, while the train is a "brutal kaleidoscope" and the motor car leaves no room to think. [What slow cycle-touring means here](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/slow-cycling) is the same argument a hundred and twenty years on — a resonance, not a lineage. The rambla is where most visitors start, and it helps to know its shape before you ride it. It runs about 22 kilometres along the Río de la Plata, fourteen named stretches under one collective name, and it has been a designated Historic-Cultural Monument since 1986. For a cyclist it divides in two: 7.7 kilometres with a lane of your own, from the Escollera Sarandí at the tip of the old town to the Prefectura in Pocitos, and 14.5 kilometres beyond that, to the Arroyo Carrasco, where you share the road with cars. [The ride itself](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/rambla-by-bike), port to Pocitos, is the classic first outing; [thirty years of photographs of the same wall](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/rambla-before-and-after) show what changed around it. The city is building toward something, and you are arriving mid-story. Montevideo's first on-street cycle lanes opened between 2010 and 2015, and by early 2019 the network already measured 35 kilometres; the official total stood at 77.3 kilometres in September 2024, and the stated target is 100 by 2030. The big works bracket that count: four kilometres up 18 de Julio, the main avenue, in December 2023; 4.7 along the Rambla Sur in September 2024; and — outside the Montevideo figure altogether, because it is Canelones' work — a 12.7-kilometre coastal path between El Pinar and the Arroyo Carrasco, completed in November 2025 and not yet joined to the rambla. The next lane, roughly 11 kilometres from the Cerro to the centre, was confirmed in May 2026. [The network's whole story in one piece](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/montevideo) is the place to read it. Set beside its neighbours, Montevideo is the small one. Buenos Aires has around 310 kilometres of cycle infrastructure, a public bike-share of some 380 stations with a free basic plan, and about 7 per cent of trips by bicycle; greater Santiago reports around 480 kilometres and is aiming for 820 by 2035. Montevideo has no working bike-share at all since its scheme closed in 2019, and its own mobility survey, with fieldwork around 2016, put bicycles at roughly 3 per cent of trips. [The numbers side by side](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/cycling-policy) make the case that bigger networks are not automatically better ones. If you are in the city now: ride the rambla first, check [what's on this week](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/events), and before you leave a bicycle anywhere, read [the anti-theft basics](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/anti-theft). Then meet the culture the infrastructure is catching up with — [a bicycle clubhouse in the old town](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/rodala), [a rolling sound system](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/musimovil) that leads rides out of Plaza Independencia on Monday nights, [the artist who started it](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/community/pedro) — the clubhouse is where it lives now — and [the port](https://pedaleando-uruguay.bike/uruguay-by-bike/first-came-the-harbour) that made modern Montevideo, a century before any of this.