The Interior & the Thermal North

Charrúa, Guenoa and Chaná peoples hunted these grasslands before the Spanish, and cattle released in the 17th century multiplied into wild herds that drew Portuguese, Spanish and Jesuit mission interests. Villa Soriano, founded in the 1620s as a mission among the Chaná on the Río Negro, is considered by many the oldest town in Uruguay. The Charrúa were ambushed and largely destroyed at the Salsipuedes creek in 1831.

The interior holds many of the independence sites. The revolt against Spain began with the Grito de Asencio near Mercedes in February 1811, and later that year Artigas led thousands of civilians north to cross the Uruguay River near Salto in the exodus remembered as the Redota. In 1825 the Thirty-Three Orientals landed at the Playa de la Agraciada in Soriano, and a congress in Florida declared independence from Brazil on 25 August.

The 19th century brought civil war between Blancos and Colorados and foreign intervention: Paysandú was besieged and taken by Brazilian and Colorado forces in 1864–65. From the 1860s the Liebig company turned Fray Bentos into an industrial meat town, and the Blanco leader Aparicio Saravia's last uprising ended after the battle of Masoller in Rivera in 1904. Rail lines, the Rincón del Bonete dam on the Río Negro in the 1940s and the Salto Grande dam in 1979 remade the region.

In the 1950s and 1960s Raúl Sendic organised the sugar-cane workers of Artigas department, the movement from which the Tupamaros grew. Under the 1973–85 dictatorship nine Tupamaro leaders, José Mujica among them, were held as "hostages" in isolation until 1985.

This is where the gaucho image lives on. Men in boinas and bombachas (wide trousers) still work cattle on horseback, rodeos called jineteadas test riders on bucking horses, and the Fiesta de la Patria Gaucha in Tacuarembó each March gathers riders, horse parades and camps from across the country. Tacuarembó also claims Carlos Gardel, the great tango singer, as a native son born near Valle Edén, although documentary evidence points to Toulouse in France.

Along the Brazilian frontier, in Rivera, Artigas and Cerro Largo, many people speak Uruguayan Portuguese, often called portuñol or fronterizo, and families, trade and football loyalties cross the border daily. Salto and Paysandú look west to Argentina across the Uruguay River and take pride in their own literary figures, among them the short-story writer Horacio Quiroga, born in Salto.

Folk music — payadores improvising verses to guitar, milongas and the songs of Alfredo Zitarrosa and other canto popular singers — is heard at festivals and rural parties. Hospitality on the estancias follows old habits: mate is passed to visitors, and the asado is cooked slowly by the men of the house.

The twelve departments hold a little under a million people. Salto, with about 110,000, is Uruguay's second-largest city after Montevideo, followed by Paysandú; Rivera, Tacuarembó, Melo, Mercedes and Artigas are the other main centres, and Flores, the smallest department, has only about 25,000 people.

Livestock is the base of the economy: beef and sheep on the northern grasslands, rice in the Laguna Merín lowlands of Treinta y Tres and Cerro Largo, soy and wheat in Soriano and Río Negro, citrus around Salto and Paysandú, and dairy in Florida and Flores. Eucalyptus and pine plantations have spread across Rivera, Tacuarembó and Durazno to feed pulp mills at Fray Bentos and near Paso de los Toros; the Fray Bentos mill caused years of protest and a bridge blockade by Argentine activists, settled by an international court ruling in 2010.

Life in the towns is unhurried: long lunches, a siesta in summer, evening walks around the main square and football on Sundays. The main concerns are young people leaving for Montevideo or abroad, limited jobs outside farming, and floods along the Uruguay River.

Interior cooking is ranch cooking. Asado con cuero, a side of beef roasted over embers in its hide, is the showpiece for festivals. Guiso carrero, a rice or noodle stew with meat and vegetables, and puchero are winter dishes, and tortas fritas go with the mate. Along the Brazilian frontier, Brazilian influences appear on family tables.

Paysandú claims the chajá, a sponge cake with cream, meringue and peaches created at a local confectioner's in 1927, and Norteña beer was first brewed in the city in 1947. Salto grows much of Uruguay's citrus, and it was there in the 19th century that the Basque immigrant Pascual Harriague planted the Tannat grape, once known in Uruguay by his name.

Freshwater fish are caught in the Uruguay and Río Negro, and Fray Bentos's meat works gave the world a brand of corned beef and meat extract.

The Uruguay River side has the hot springs. Salto's Termas del Daymán and Termas del Arapey and Paysandú's Termas de Guaviyú and Termas de Almirón pump warm mineral water into public pools and hotels, and Salto adds the Salto Grande dam and Quiroga's house museum. Paysandú has its basilica, badly damaged in the 1864–65 siege, and the old riverfront; Fray Bentos has the former Anglo meat works, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In Soriano are Mercedes, the colonial village of Villa Soriano and the Playa de la Agraciada landing site.

The Río Negro crosses the country from Brazil, widened by dams into the reservoirs of Rincón del Bonete, Baygorria and Palmar, with beaches and fishing around Paso de los Toros and San Gregorio de Polanco. Durazno and Florida have riverside parks, and Florida the Piedra Alta monument to the 1825 declaration; in Flores the Grutas del Palacio, small sandstone caves, lie within a UNESCO Global Geopark.

Tacuarembó is the gaucho country: the green hills of Valle Edén with its Gardel museum, the city's Laguna de las Lavanderas, where the March festival is held, and the sandstone hills and ravines of the countryside around. North are Rivera's Plaza Internacional and the amethyst and agate mines around Artigas. In the east, the Quebrada de los Cuervos in Treinta y Tres is a forested ravine where vultures circle above the Yerbal Chico creek, and Cerro Largo's Melo is the gateway to the Laguna Merín shore.