Portal to a Bygone Era: the cobblestone streets and fortified walls of Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, are vestiges of a stage where the Portuguese-Spanish tug-of-war played out during the 18th century.

• Author: Jones, Dennis
• Position: Essay

Few places in the Americas offer such a distinct sense of the pastas the Uruguayan town of Colonia del Sacramento. The aura of antiquity comes in part from the immaculately maintained cobbled streets, the beautiful old churches, and the narrow lanes of bougainvillea laden, slate-roofed stone houses. But the illusion of a place out of time, a town existing quite apart from our 21st century, comes also from its incredible realm of quietude. Colonia's languid pace and lovely tree-lined streets, free of any traffic and hubbub, are atypical of the modern world.

Colonia's antithesis, the bustling megalopolis of Buenos Aires, Argentina, lays a short fifteen miles west across the estuary of the Río de la Plata. For centuries, these two citadels have guarded the mouths of the Río Paraná and the Río Uruguay, paths to the interior of the South American continent and highways down which riches flowed to the old world.

The founding of the Portuguese town of Nova Colonia do Santísimo Sacramento in 1680 by Manuel de Lobo began 131 years of conflict between the Portuguese and the Spanish and earned it the title, Manzana de la discordia (Apple of Discord). Prior to Colonia's founding, Europeans saw little to recommend in the area. The region was inhabited by a group of indigenous peoples, the Charrua, hunters and gathering about which little was known. In 1516, Spanish explorer, Juan Díaz de Solís, sailed into the enormous caramel-colored estuary of the Río de la Plata. The estuary forms a huge wedge, 174 miles across at its mouth, driven into the eastern flank of South America separating eastern Uruguay from Argentina. Seeing little of value and few natives, de Solís landed somewhere in the vicinity of Colonia only to be immediately killed by the evidently distrustful Charrua. The dearth of mineral wealth in the area attracted little European attention allowing the region's ecology and character to remain relatively intact for almost two centuries.

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During this time, prior to the continuous conflicts between Spain and Portugal, pirates and privateers from England, Spain, Holland, and France set cattle loose throughout the region. The non-native herds proliferated, and their dried meat and hides, along with ill-gotten gains from piracy and smuggling, became fundamental items of trade. Interestingly, the native peoples adapted to the new food source. Archaeological evidence, in the form of...