Walking the fog off Montevideo

FOG hides the whole world map and only your own walking removes it. In Montevideo the obvious move is the Rambla, and the interesting problem is what happens when you only walk the Rambla.

The city is a coastline with streets behind it

Montevideo sits on the north bank of the Rio de la Plata, and the defining feature for anyone walking is the Rambla, a continuous paved promenade that runs along the water for more than twenty kilometres from the port around past Pocitos and Buceo and out towards Carrasco.

It is one path, unbroken, with the brown river on one side and the city on the other. You can walk it for hours without a junction, a traffic light or a decision. The ground is flat, with only gentle rises where the coast turns, and the wind off the water is constant and often strong.

Behind it, the city is a straightforward grid of low buildings, arranged in neighbourhoods that step back from the shore. Which means that on a fog map Montevideo has a very particular signature.

Why the map fills as a stripe

Walk the Rambla and you produce a long thin bright band tracing the coast. It looks impressive, it covers real distance, and it barely moves the city percent. A single line of cleared ground, however long, encloses almost no area.

To actually fill Montevideo you have to turn inland and work the grid. Pocitos is the best place to do it. It is flat, regular, dense with apartment blocks, and the streets run at right angles down to the beach, so you can walk a zigzag of a few blocks and clear a proper rectangle rather than a thread. Punta Carretas and Cordon behave the same way.

The trick most people land on here is a comb. Walk out along the Rambla, then come back through the grid one street inland, cutting down to the water every few blocks. It costs you a little distance and doubles the area you light.

An afternoon from the old town

Start in Ciudad Vieja, the old town on the small peninsula by the port. It is a compact colonial grid, easy to cover almost completely in a couple of hours, and it contains the Mercado del Puerto, Plaza Matriz and the pedestrianised Peatonal Sarandi, which runs east through the whole quarter to Plaza Independencia and the Palacio Salvo.

From there walk south to the water and pick up the Rambla Sur. Follow it east past Parque Rodo and Playa Ramirez, round the point at Punta Carretas with the old lighthouse, and along to Pocitos beach. That is roughly nine or ten kilometres of coast, and if you comb back inland through Pocitos on the way home you will have a solid block of cleared map rather than a line.

Weather, wind and practicalities

The climate is mild and the seasons are southern, so January and February are hot and humid and July is cool and damp. Nothing here stops you walking for months at a time the way a northern winter does. What you will notice instead is the wind, which comes across open water with nothing in the way, and rain that arrives quickly.

Buildings are low almost everywhere, so a phone position stays clean. The one exception is the small cluster of towers around Punta Carretas and the newer blocks along the Pocitos shore, and even there it is mild.

FOG keeps revealing with the app closed and the screen off, so a two hour walk on the Rambla records itself while the phone stays in your pocket. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account to make.

Questions people actually ask

Start with a dark map.

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