The Uruguay River at Salto

The Uruguay River runs about 1,800 km from the Serra Geral in southern Brazil to the Río de la Plata, and for its last 508 km it is the border between Uruguay and Argentina. Salto is on the east bank, with Concordia opposite. Here two ledges of basalt crossed the river and broke it into white water: Salto Chico, 3 km north of the centre, and Salto Grande, the big one, upstream where the dam now stands. The city took its name from them, and so did most of what happened to it afterwards.

On 8 November 1756 a Spanish column under governor José Joaquín de Viana, marching north in the war with the Guaraní missions, stopped here because its boats could go no further. The barracks it built were called San Antonio del Salto Chico, a fort followed in 1757, and the date is still the city's birthday. For the next two hundred years Salto was the place where anything coming up the river had to come off the boat.

Below the dam it is still a river: islands, sandbanks, gallery forest on both banks, and a level that rises with the rain in Brazil and falls with what the turbines are doing upstream. The height in front of the port is read on the port gauge every day, and the Intendencia, the Prefectura and the local press all quote the same number.

In October 1811, after the first siege of Montevideo was lifted and the Banda Oriental was left under the Spanish viceroy, José Gervasio Artigas refused to stay. He marched north, and the people of the countryside went with him: families, carts, cattle, gauchos, Guaraní and Charrúa, the poor of a whole province, more than ten thousand people by most counts. They called it la Redota, the country way of saying derrota, a word that in the Spanish of the time meant the route taken as much as a defeat. Uruguay calls it the Éxodo del Pueblo Oriental, and it is the founding story of the nation.

In December 1811 the column reached the river just north of Salto, by the mouth of the Arroyo San Antonio, and camped on the bank for a month. Then it crossed: carts, animals and people ferried over to the Ayuí on the Entre Ríos side, where the camp stayed until the following spring. The crossing was about 2 km upstream of where the Concordia boat runs today, around the Parador Ayuí and the small falls. The river in front of you there is the one they crossed.

Artigas came back through this river country once more, in 1820, on his way to exile in Paraguay, and never returned. The main square of Salto carries his name, as does the one in every town in the country.

For a century the river was Salto's road. The first steamers left for Montevideo in 1852, and in 1857 local merchants founded the Compañía Salteña de Navegación a Vapor, with two paddle steamers built in England and named Salto and Montevideo: four sailings a month down to the capital, calling at Concordia, Paysandú, Concepción del Uruguay, Fray Bentos and Nueva Palmira, and Justo José de Urquiza among the shareholders. The city built ships of its own in yards north of the Sauzal stream, and by the 1860s it was one of the main shipping towns on the river.

Everything stopped at Salto because the river did. Above Salto Chico and Salto Grande no steamer could pass, so the trade of the upper river and of Rio Grande do Sul came off the boats here and went on by cart, and from 1874 by train: the line from the wharf to Itapebí, extended to Santa Rosa, today's Bella Unión, in 1875, was proposed by the steamship company itself to get round the falls. Concordia opened its own railway north in the same year for the same reason. A town that is the end of the line for everything gets rich, and this one did.

That is where the look of the centre comes from. The Teatro Larrañaga, the Ateneo, the Palacio Córdoba facing the port, the banks and mansions along Calle Uruguay and the big houses that are now museums were paid for by the river trade of the decades after 1860, and they give Salto an air the rest of the interior does not have: a port town's confidence, with a theatre where a market town would have a shed. Mihanovich's company was still running paddle steamers from Buenos Aires in the 1920s, the General Artigas and the General Alvear, 446 passengers each in two classes, and the General Artigas worked until 1960. A last try at river tourism, the Ciudad del Salto in 1952, lost money on its first trip. Road and rail finished the job. The passenger boat to Concordia, ten minutes across from the same port, is what is left of the carrera.

Salto faces west across the water, so the whole town gets the sunset over the river, in front of the costanera, with the lights of Concordia coming on along the far bank. The routine is mate, a flask wedged against a backpack, tortas fritas if someone thought ahead, and nobody in a hurry. The port gives you the urban version, old architecture at your back and a working river in front; the Costanera Sur the classic one; the Parador Ayuí and Parque del Lago the wide-open ones, where on a still evening the sky burns twice, once above the far shore and once at your feet.

My note on the sunsets of Salto goes through each spot, from the port to the lake.

Four of the river's big fish, the dorado, the surubí, the boga and the sábalo, move upstream every spring to spawn, and for two centuries the falls stopped them at Salto. Now the wall does. The water below it, the stretch the anglers call La Zona, is fished from open boats with an outboard and a guide who rigs the rods, in three-hour slots from Monday to Thursday. CARU allows only artificial lures there, cast with a fly rod, a spinning rod or a baitcaster, with no bait and no trolling, on barbless hooks, and every fish from a boat goes back. Further down, the stretch to Salto Chico is fished all year round, from boats and from the bank, with lures or live bait, and the guides say the live eel works best. From November the boga comes in for the shore anglers on the costanera.

Fly fishing is sold here too: a lodge on the river at Salto fishes the dorado with fly rods, wading in summer when the river drops, and calls itself the first fly-fishing lodge in Uruguay.

The Journal note on fishing in Uruguay has the seasons, the rules and how La Zona works; the Dorado Fishing day is bookable from this site.

Not the river in front of the city, strictly speaking. BirdLife International lists 22 Important Bird Areas in Uruguay and four of them are in Salto, and the nearest, San Antonio, begins a few kilometres north-east of the centre along the Arroyo San Antonio, the stream whose mouth the Exodus crossed beside: 33,000 ha of gallery forest, river-island woodland and natural grassland, listed in 2008 for three small birds that breed there, the ochre-breasted pipit and the dark-throated and chestnut seedeaters, the capuchinos that migrate along the river every spring. Further downstream, in Río Negro, the Esteros de Farrapos and its 24 river islands are a national park and a Ramsar wetland.

On the riverfront in town you get herons and cormorants without trying, the parakeets in the palms and the lapachos in bloom in August. The four areas are in the table on the Citrus Country page, the birdwatching note has the seasons, and a morning with a local guide is on the Birdwatching page.