Uruguay

Más allá de la capital, las principales ciudades son Salto, Paysandú — cada una un centro de cultura regional, economía e historia. Montevideo's Old City retains the grid of its 1726 Spanish colonial founding, and its Mercado del Puerto — a 19th-century iron market hall built for the port — now houses parrilla restaurants where the open charcoal grills burn wood from the Uruguayan interior, a lunch ritual that stockbrokers and dock workers attend in equal numbers.

El idioma oficial es español, que refleja el patrimonio cultural del país y lo conecta con una amplia comunidad internacional. Internacionalmente, Uruguay se contacta mediante el código +598. Uruguay became the first country in the world to fully legalise recreational cannabis, in 2013 under President José Mujica — a former Tupamaros guerrilla who served 14 years in solitary confinement and then governed from a small farm, donating 90 percent of his presidential salary to charity.

Uruguay comparte sus fronteras con Argentina, Brasil. El tráfico rodado circula por la derecha, en consonancia con la convención de

La vida económica y cotidiana se rige por la zona horaria de UTC-03:00, alineando el país con sus vecinos regionales.

The Chivito was invented in Montevideo in 1944 when a restaurant owner, unable to supply a customer who asked for goat meat, improvised with beef steak, ham, bacon, egg and cheese in a roll — and the resulting sandwich became Uruguay's national snack, sold from beachfront kiosks along the entire Río de la Plata coast.

Uruguay won the inaugural FIFA World Cup on home soil in 1930 and repeated it in Brazil in 1950 — the Maracanazo, their 2–1 defeat of Brazil in the Maracanã before 200,000 people, is still described in Brazil as 'the greatest national tragedy' — achievements extraordinary for a country whose entire population is smaller than many of the cities it defeated.

Uruguay's landscape is almost entirely Pampas grassland — the Campos — rolling hills without the dramatic peaks or canyons of its neighbours, a geography that made cattle ranching the economic and cultural foundation of the nation and produced the gaucho tradition of horseback herding that persists on working estancias.