Where in the World is Montevideo?

[tartysuz]

Since I'm going to be obsessed with the Uruguay football team for next three days, I thought I should brush up on the country.

Things Wikipedia taught me:

• It's tiny, a bit smaller than Washington state.
  
• It has 3.5 million residents, about 1/3 more than the City of Toronto. About 88% are of European descent, compared to just over 50% in Toronto.
  
• It is considered the most secular of South American countries.
  
• It is the first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage. (This is probably related to the above factoid!)
  
• It's had a very colourful political history and is now headed by a leftist coalition.
  
• Its national sport is...you guessed it: football!

I also found an update on Diego Forlan, sounding gracious in defeat, but game for Saturday. Yep, Dean Winchesterly decent!

Comments

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

Uruguay is basically New Zealand to Argentina's Australia: similar history, economics, et cetera.

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. In contrast to NZ, Uruguay has a very small aboriginal population, which was surprising to read. Wikipedia didn't get into it, but noted there was very little evidence of human habitation before European settlement.

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

That's the main difference: in marked contrast to New Zealand (not so much Australia) and like Argentina, Uruguay's native population was dispersed and fairly low-tech. That's partly because of three centuries of sustained contact with Europeans before the beginning of mass immigration into independent Uruguay in the mid-19th century.

Argentina and Uruguay have fairly similar histories, becoming noteworthy polities in the early 19th century, receiving mass immigration from the mid-19th century on, and enjoying resource-driven economic booms in the context of increased social-democratic and other radicalism into the 20th century. Things just diverged most visibly from Australasia in the 1930s, particularly.