Three Days in Colonia

Tasca del Sur

Restaurant | "Mexican Food!"

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Brent and I love a good Mexican restuarant, so when we happened upon Tasca del Sur, we abandoned the other restaurant we had planned to eat at and sat down. It was late afternoon, and we were the only customers. This was due partly to the time of day, I´m sure, and also partly to the location. It´s not really out of the way, but it's on a side street away from the main plazas, and there is not nearly as much foot traffic there as in other areas.Brent had fish fajitas and was thrilled with the choice. The order only came with two small tortillas, so he ordered another two -- the extra ones cost about 50 cents.The menu offered an assortment of quesadillas, and I chose...Read More

Member Rating 5 out of 5 on November 23, 2011

Tasca del Sur
Paseo de Las Flores
Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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Sleeping in Colonia

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View of the River Photo - Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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As I mentioned in another story, if you're traveling to Colonia in the spring or summer you might want to make reservations. There are lots of little hotels, but they fill up fast. We did not have reservations for our mid-November visit, and we were told ´´good luck´´ at the first hotel we tried, because the whole city was booked for Saturday night -- and we needed Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We stopped for lunch and tried again. The woman at the counter of the next place grimaced when we said we needed three nights, saying that the whole town was full. But! She had a friend with a room, a beautiful room. So she placed a phone call and found out that it was available.We wal...Read More

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A Long Weekend in Colonia

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Playground Photo - Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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Chances are, your guidebook calls Colonia a day trip. And indeed, if you are on a trip with a time limit, you can do plenty here in a day before moving on to the next stop on your journey, and in fact might get restless with more time than that. For us, however, it was an escape from the chaos that is Buenos Aires, and we enjoyed every minute of those three days.There are a lot of great restaurants in Colonia, so we focused much of our time around picking a place and enjoying our meals. Get away from busy Plaza Mayor and you'll find lots of other options. Try some Uruguayan wines, or medio y medio: half wine, half champagne. (Eh. It tasted fine, but it was sort of just a way to ruin a good...Read More

Chances are, your guidebook calls Colonia a day trip. And indeed, if you are on a trip with a time limit, you can do plenty here in a day before moving on to the next stop on your journey, and in fact might get restless with more time than that. For us, however, it was an escape from the chaos that is Buenos Aires, and we enjoyed every minute of those three days.

There are a lot of great restaurants in Colonia, so we focused much of our time around picking a place and enjoying our meals. Get away from busy Plaza Mayor and you'll find lots of other options. Try some Uruguayan wines, or medio y medio: half wine, half champagne. (Eh. It tasted fine, but it was sort of just a way to ruin a good wine and/or ruin a good champagne.)

Visit the crafts market! It´s a great place to buy gifts for everyone back home, and a lot of the stuff is similar to what you will find in the craft and souvenir stores, except cheaper. T-shirts, for example, were considerably cheaper at the market. There are so many stalls; you'll probably find something for yourself, too.

We spent one whole morning walking up the beach toward Plaza del Toro. This was when I got sunburned the first time, so watch out. The beaches are lovely, though, and really started to fill up by afternoon when we were on our way back. Aside from the old bullfighting stadium, there's not much up here except houses, but the beach walk was fantastic.

The mall is a short walk away from the old town; we went because we were hoping to catch a movie, but there were only four offerings, and no matinees -- just one, sometimes two, showings of each film per night. The mall is quite small, but it includes a grocery store where we got some fantastic strawberries and a plastic candy cane full of jelly beans.

Having grown accustomed to Buenos Aires, where it seems almost more likely to get hit by a car than not, we were pleasantly surprised to find that cars in Colonia actually stop for pedestrians, even when they have the green light!

We lucked out on finding a place to stay in a guest house. We had no reservations, and were turned away from two posadas before one owner called her friend, who has the guest house. The room was a bit cheaper than the two hotels we stopped by, and it included breakfast and a cool sitting room where we could have watched the sunset if it hadn't been so cloudy. Word to the wise: make reservations, just to be safe. Colonia is a popular weekend getaway. We noticed that on Sunday especially the streets were extra busy.

Brent and I are both people who love to visit new places, but we've already got a soft spot in our hearts for Colonia. I can't wait for the next three day weekend.
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Museum Going in Colonia

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Bones Photo - Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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Colonia has a great little deal where you can get a pass to four museums for 50 Uruguayan pesos. This is about US$2.50.Seems like great, cheap entertainment, and it is, but not all of these museums are created equal. History buffs beware. You can purchase this pass at Museo Municipal, which, for the record, is worth visiting. You will get a stamp on the back of your ticket each time you visit a new museum. We used ours over the course of two days; I´m not sure if it's good for longer than that but you can ask if it's a concern for you. The museums are all pretty small; you'd have no trouble doing them all easily in one afternoon and still have time for ice cream.The...Read More

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Portuguese Museum

Attraction | "The Portuguese Museum"

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This museum chronicles the Portuguese influence in Uruguay. There are great maps, drawings of traditional clothing, weapons, ceramics, and more.

There is a lot of reading to be done in here, so again, you might be wishing you could understand Spanish. There´s an entire room dedicated to slavery, which was pretty interesting. We didn't take the time to read everything, as it was the last museum on our path and we were ready to be done with museums for the day, but if we had gone here first I would have spent a lot more time in here.

Of the four museums we went to, this was in the top 50%. It´s worth a visit, especially if you speak Spanish.

Member Rating 3 out of 5 on November 23, 2011

Portuguese Museum
Calle San Pedro
Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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Museo Indigena

Attraction | "Rocks and More Rocks"

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Museo Indigena sounded promising, but it ended up being about as impressive as Casa Nacarello. This is the collection of items used by the Charruas Indians.

Rocks.

Yes, rocks as weapons, but still rocks. Gray rocks. Some were perfectly round. Some had indentations on them, having been used as arrow, hatchet, or hammer heads. Case after case of matching rocks. Far more interesting are the rocks you see in the souvenir stores and the marketplace.

I find indigenous culture fascinating and I've visited some great indigenous museums, but this wasn't really one of them. With seven museums to choose from, you can do better.

Member Rating 2 out of 5 on November 23, 2011

Museo Indigena
Del Comercio
Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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Museo Municipal

Attraction | "A Random Collection"

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The Museo Municipal was probably our favorite of the four museums we visited in Colonia. There was a group of school kids there while we visited, but other than that it was pretty quiet and if it weren't for the kids we could have lingered a bit longer at certain displays.In the first few rooms you can find old weapons and arrowheads, maps, furniture, and a cool little model of Colonia in 1762. We especially enjoyed the paleontological display, which included a fairly complete skeleton of a bear-like creature, the shell of something that seemed to be related to an armadillo (only much, much bigger), and lots of embalmed birds and butterflies, moths, and creepy crawlers.This is ...Read More

Member Rating 4 out of 5 on November 23, 2011

Museo Municipal
Plaza Mayor
Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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Museo Casa de Nacarello

Attraction | "Five Minutes in Museo Casa Nacarello"

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Seriously. Five minutes.This was the first stop on our four-museum tour. It's right next door to the Museo Municipal.Casa Nacarello is an 18th-century Portuguese home, fitted with furniture replicas. Ta-da. You walk in, you walk through four or five rooms, you walk out. Actually, it wouldn't have even taken us five minutes if we hadn't stopped to laugh halfway through.It's bigger than our apartment in Buenos Aires, which left us feeling a little bummed out. It's not really worth the stop if you're doing the four-museum ticket, but at the same time, it´s kind of funny that they consider it a museum. And the worker at the desk was really nice. Eh. At only ...Read More

Member Rating 2 out of 5 on November 23, 2011

Museo Casa de Nacarello
E. De La Peña
Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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Viejo Barrio Restaurant and Bar

Restaurant | "Rabas at Viejo Barrio"

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We went to Viejo Barrio after we'd spent 15 minutes waiting for someone to acknowledge our presence at The Drugstore. It was late afternoon, but there were still a couple of open tables waiting for us outside. We were just after a snack, having eaten a late lunch and being not quite hungry enough for a full meal, but too hungry to keep trucking through the hot sun. Brent ordered his customary beer, and I had a glass of white wine. We'd been seeing rabas (calamari) on every menu, and since we're both big fans of this particular treat, we went right for it.And they were a bit of a disappointment. We'd seen several plates of rabas served to neighboring tables at other restaurants,...Read More

Member Rating 3 out of 5 on November 23, 2011

Viejo Barrio Restaurant and Bar
Vasconcellos 169
Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay
598 52 25 399

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El Drugstore

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Restaurant | "Dinner at The Drugstore"

Flower Pot Photo - El Drugstore, Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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This corner restaurant was always hopping, so we made a point to have dinner there one evening. We actually had to sit down at a dirty table and wait for the waiter to notice us and come over to clean it up; the place was so busy there was nowhere else to sit outside! Inside there were still plenty of tables, but who wants to sit inside on such a lovely evening?The menu was extensive and varied: meat, Japenese food, salads. We ordered a bottle of white wine and settled in to wait for our meals.I ordered a salad, which was great. Fresh onion, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, palm hearts, red and green peppers, and eggs (which I gave to Brent) were piled high on my rectangular plate. I...Read More

Member Rating 4 out of 5 on November 23, 2011

El Drugstore
Plaza de Armas
Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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Parrillada Barbeque

Restaurant | "Dinner on a Rainy Evening"

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It was only sprinkling when we left our room to go have dinner. We chose Parrillada Barbeque because we hadn't eaten there yet, and it was the first place we came to.The service was very friendly and prompt here. We were given a little dish of peanuts with our beer as we waited for the main course to arrive. The rain started to come down harder, and the electricity went out two or three times, but we were still served our meals in a timely fashion. Brent ordered what seemed to me like a fish stroganoff, but with a tomato-based sauce, which he really enjoyed. I ordered the berenjena caprese (eggplant with cheese, tomato, and basil), and it was absolutely fantastic. It was on the...Read More

Member Rating 4 out of 5 on November 23, 2011

Parrillada Barbeque

Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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Amada Cafe

Restaurant | "Lunch at Amada Cafe"

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We ducked into the Amada Cafe to escape the heat for an early lunch. It was beautiful inside: charming tables, what seems to be an old well, stone stairs, and lots of art on the walls. There was no one there, and the waitress promptly delivered our menus.Brent ordered a tuna panini, which came out in a baguette, heavy on the bread. I had the vegetable risotto. I had to sort through it to find the occasional pea or carrot, but it was good, even though I had really hoped for more vegetables. The highlight for Brent was his licuado -- a strawberry-peach combination that was, in his words, ´´worth the price of admission right there.´´ I wasn't as impressed with it, as I tend to li...Read More

Member Rating 4 out of 5 on November 23, 2011

Amada Cafe

Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

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