Colonia del Sacramento was founded by the Portuguese in 1680, taken by the Spanish in 1778, and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995. It is the oldest town in Uruguay and the one that looks least like it belongs to Uruguay’s landscape of wide beaches and gently rolling countryside. The Barrio Histórico is a compact historic district on a small peninsula in the Río de la Plata, where cobblestone streets lead to the river’s edge and the Buenos Aires skyline is visible across the water on clear days. For couples who want the atmosphere of a colonial city without the crowds that define Cartagena or Cusco, Colonia is the answer.

The Cobblestone Streets

Calle de los Suspiros (Street of Sighs) is the most photographed street in Colonia, a short cobblestone lane with colonial-era buildings, flowering vines on the walls, and lamppost lighting that gives it a particular evening quality. It is genuinely beautiful and it is also the one street in Colonia that I avoid for ceremony work because every other photographer who visits does exactly the same frame in exactly the same location. The streets I prefer are the ones immediately surrounding the Plaza Mayor and along the river-facing edges of the peninsula, where the cobblestones continue and the density of tourists is a fraction of what it is on Calle de los Suspiros. The architecture is as good and the photographs do not look like everyone else’s photographs of Colonia.

Colonial cobblestone street in Colonia del Sacramento Uruguay with Portuguese colonial architecture and flowering vines — The streets off the main tourist route in Colonia. The cobblestones and colonial facades are identical in quality to the famous Calle de los Suspiros but without the foot traffic. I work these streets almost exclusively now because the photographs that come from them are both better and original.

The River and the Buenos Aires Skyline

The Río de la Plata here is wide enough that the Buenos Aires skyline across the water appears as a faint silver line on clear days, the largest city in Argentina visible from the oldest city in Uruguay across 50 kilometres of brown river water. The ferry crossing from Buenos Aires takes an hour, which makes Colonia a natural add-on for couples who include Buenos Aires in a South American itinerary. The riverfront itself is one of the ceremony locations I use most frequently in Colonia: the water, the colonial buildings visible along the bank, the lighthouse at the point of the peninsula, and the light off the river in the afternoon when the sun is low and the water is gold.

Colonia del Sacramento riverfront with colonial buildings along the Rio de la Plata shore and the afternoon light on the water — The riverfront in Colonia. The Río de la Plata is brown, not blue, which affects how the water photographs. The afternoon light on it is warm in a way that works with the colonial architecture along the bank. On clear days, a faint line on the horizon is Buenos Aires.

Quiet That Is the Point

Colonia receives day-trippers from Buenos Aires on a regular schedule: ferries arrive in the morning and return in the evening, and the Barrio Histórico fills between 10am and 4pm accordingly. Before 9am and after 5pm the historic district is largely empty. The streets are lit only by lampposts. The cats that patrol the cobblestones conduct their evening business undisturbed. The river makes no sound that you can hear from the street. I plan ceremony sessions to begin at 7am when the morning light rakes across the colonial facades and the town has not yet received its daily visitors, or at 5:30pm when they have gone. The specific quality of Colonia is not its architecture or its history, though both are remarkable. It is the silence in the morning and the early evening, when a city that is hundreds of years old is briefly returned to the pace it kept before the ferry was invented.