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Culture, safety and Old World charm make Montevideo a great place to visit

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<i> Times Staff Writer</i>

Imagine a place where one can walk the streets without fear at any hour, day or night? This is how Sharon Dirlam describes Montevideo.

--Jerry Hulse, Times Travel Editor

Twelve years of a repressive military dictatorship has ended in this small and friendly country, and the “born-again” democracy is a great place to visit.

Making up for lost time, they’re standing in line to see the X-rated movie, “Deep Throat,” and books by Pablo Neruda are prominently displayed in the bookstore windows of this little nation wedged between the two giants, Brazil and Argentina.

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The capital, Montevideo, with 1.5 million people (half of the country’s population), may be the perfect tourist town. The suburbs sprawl for miles along the wide river, Rio de la Plata, but there is one main street downtown, 18 de Julio, and if you stay in one of the hotels near the Plaza Independencia, you can see much of what there is to see by walking.

Furthermore, Montevideo is virtually crime-free. A sense of paranoia, a hidden money belt, a constant wary watch over one’s shoulder seem unnecessary here. You can walk anywhere at any hour.

You can even drink the water. People are friendly and helpful. Buildings are distinctively quaint and oddly sophisticated, with a time-warped Old World quality that has been compared to cities of Eastern Europe. Uruguay has compulsory education and boasts the highest literacy rate in South America, more than 95%.

A stroll or drive through the residential areas reveals another aspect of Uruguay as well: There’s Old Money here. Spacious homes, from flamboyant Moorish mansions to carefully tended baronial estates, line the wide streets.

But the Old Money has fallen on hard times, and what prevails now is an abundance of empty silk purses. Uruguay’s Belle Epoque, or as they now call it, the era of the fat cows, no longer exists. An economy of exports, primarily beef, wool and leather products, no longer sustains the opulent life style that the people once enjoyed.

One of the main markets was the world’s armies during the two world wars, and Uruguay’s postwar economy has never quite recovered.

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One result of this economic stagnation is a veritable treasure chest for antique hunters as the family heirlooms have hit the streets.

Every Saturday and Sunday at Montevideo’s open-air markets, shoppers can find everything from sterling silver tea services and dresser sets to Spanish swords and even suits of armor, from old radios and Victrolas to quaint hats, fine lace and grandmother’s jewelry. Everything but someone to buy them.

These treasures line the sidewalks on weekend mornings, but most of the local shoppers are busy making purchases from the rows and stacks of fresh fruit and vegetables that line the center of the market area. The weekend is the time to visit Montevideo.

Also not to be missed is the port area. A building that was shipped over by the English a century or so ago for use as a train station never achieved that status. Instead it became the Mercado del Puerto, the port market, and it houses a hodgepodge of restaurants surrounding a central bar that is as close as Montevideo comes to having a singles scene.

Weekend afternoons will find the mercado wall-to-wall with crowds that stand around sipping drinks and yelling to be heard over the din of live band music and other chatting groups. One popular drink is medio y medio , a mixture of white wine and champagne. With this as an afternoon refreshment, one can understand why the dinner hour doesn’t begin until 10 or 11 at night.

To recover from that chaos, groups break away and congregate at sidewalk restaurants outside the big high-arched building. The preferred lunch is a plateful of meat. Uruguayans lead the world in beef consumption at an average of 166 pounds a year per person.

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In the mixture of market and open-stall restaurants about a dozen grills operate, cooking the meat over huge charcoal grates. Customers sit at small tables in the open. Ventriloquists, musicians and other strolling entertainers may be making the rounds.

Another of Montevideo’s special treats is the Teatro Solis, a handsome building that is the center of regularly scheduled concerts and cultural activities, just off Plaza Independencia, the city center.

An event at the Solis usually means a full house, and the theater is a favorite with touring groups such as a flamenco troupe from Spain that performed recently. Performers like the place not only for its appreciative audiences but also for its perfect acoustics.

From any of the six tiers of boxes that lined the side walls to the rows in the back of the hall, the sound was perfect. The Solis looks like an elegant opera house of ornate 19th-Century design. (Most performances are in Spanish.)

The most important building in the country and another superb piece of architecture is Palacio Legislativo or Legislative Palace. It combines 45 varieties of Uruguayan marble and granite in its mosaic floors and walls, and its stained-glass windows depicting historic events are exquisite. The building cost $17 million to build, an extraordinary sum in the 1920s.

All around the city, run-down and sometimes abandoned buildings are side by side with nicely kept residences and shops. Broken glass and fallen bricks are next to pastel-painted shutters and restored Victorian facades, a sign that for many the times are still hard.

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Leather goods, textiles, woolens and native amethysts are the goods that bring shoppers to Uruguay from neighboring countries. Men and women can buy made-to-order suits, beautifully tailored, for $60 and up. Department stores have a largerselection of bolts of fabric than ready-to-wear clothes. Everyone, it seems, has a personal tailor who will whip up a dress or a suit at a reasonable cost.

Casa Mario is a good leather shop, and they’ll pick you up at your hotel and take you to their store to make your purchases, or even just to browse.

The place to visit for handmade woolen goods is Manos del Uruguay. Sweaters that compare to those costing $200 in U.S. stores can be bought for around $60. They also have handmade rugs, ponchos and tapestries.

Uruguayan nutria is said to be the best there is, with longer, thicker, softer hair and better color than any other. Nutria is a South American water-dwelling animal; its fur resembles beaver. The place to try is Peleteria Holandesa.

Boutiques and other shops line Avenida 18 de Julio and the nearby Sarandi, through the old city gates from Plaza Independencia, along with several good art galleries. Most are open from 10 to 6.

A Top Restaurant

One of the city’s best restaurants is Panoramico Municipal, on the top floor of the Municipal Building. It serves both lunch and dinner (expensive for Montevideo, a lunch cost $35 for two, with wine) and has a good view of the city.

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The Victoria Plaza Hotel, an 18-floor building on the main plaza, is comfortable and convenient. Its restaurant features dinner shows on weekends. We saw a performance called Candombe, by a group of black musicians. The music originated with slaves who performed in costume at Mardi Gras, and seems to have changed little from that time.

The Victoria Plaza Hotel has the faded elegance that marks much of Montevideo. The service is good and the furnishings are opulent, including beaded light fixtures and heavy velour or quilted bedspreads. It was bought by the Unification Church’s Rev. Sun Myung Moon in the days of the dictatorship. He wants to expand it but the new government is not so sure it wants that. (Doubles, $70-$80.)

Two Other Hotels

Other good hotels are the Internacional, also downtown and a favorite with business travelers (doubles $28-$48), and out on the Rambla in Carrasco, 20 minutes from downtown, the Hotel Casino Carrasco, (doubles, $60).

There’s no black market for dollars in Uruguay, mainly because dollars are readily available on the open market. Both for its monetary policies and its studious neutrality (such as during the Falkland Islands conflict between Argentina and England), Uruguay has been called the Switzerland of South America.

There’s no indigenous population in Uruguay. They say that the Indians who inhabited the area were all driven out or shot a couple of centuries ago. The small black population, descended from slaves brought in by the Spanish settlers, have not really been assimilated into the culture. One Uruguayan commented: “We have no problem with discrimination. We don’t mix.”

On the Local Scene

Notes: Lawn tennis is popular. Outdoor barbecues are a big event. Nightclubs generally don’t get started until 11 p.m. Cabs are cheap. Honking a horn is against the law.

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People carry around containers of herb tea that they drink through a straw. It’s called mate . They used to drink coca tea. In Uruguay, the word gringo refers to an Italian, not a Yankee.

A few years ago Uruguay was noted for its old cars. High import taxes and customs duties kept Uruguayans from buying new cars, and around 1976 half of the cars in the country were more than 25 years old.

But that situation changed during a period of rampant inflation under the dictatorship, and now there are very few antique cars. The former U.S. ambassador is said to have bought up half a dozen antique cars and had them shipped home to the States.

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