This week's dream: Montevideo's endless promenade

A beach — Pocitos Beach in Montevideo, Uruguay (Image credit: El Ojo Torpe / Getty Images)

So often, a walk along the waterfront can be "a window into the soul of a city," said Mya Guarnieri in The New York Times. That's certainly true in Montevideo, Uruguay's capital, home to one of the world's longest sidewalks. La Rambla, as it's called, meanders for 14 miles along the broad Río de la Plata, past beaches, wine bars, and purple-blossomed jacaranda trees. It also passes statues, soccer matches, and "friends engrossed in conversations over cups of yerba mate." La Rambla is "essentially the city's outdoor living room" — especially when it's summer in the Southern Hemisphere and the entire population seems to tote folding chairs to the water's edge to enjoy the cooling breeze.

Montevideo itself is "a flower-speckled city that melds Old World and modernist architecture," and La Rambla, built between 1923 and 1935, ties together many of its disparate neighborhoods. As it winds from the portside Parque Capurro to the high-end Carrasco area in the east, its name changes slightly. On the first morning of my long weekend in Montevideo, I set out from the Palladium Business Hotel, adjacent to the fashionable Pocitos district, and headed west toward Parque Rodó, "an urban gem of a park." Along the way, I spotted sailboats bobbing outside the century-old Yacht Club Uruguayo. I passed a food truck whose name, amusingly, translated as "I'm Joey, the King of Fry Bread." And I paused at a granite plaque to read Sonnet to a Palm, by the celebrated local poet Juana de Ibarbourou. Movingly, in the final stanza, she likens a palm tree to her "eternal homeland."

The following day, I walked through Montevideo's Old City district and eventually followed the smell of smoke to the Port Market, a maze of bars and parrillas, or steakhouses, all spread out next to the Rambla under a soaring 1860s wrought-iron roof. Inside the cathedral-like space, diners sat elbow to elbow at the bars while sunlight filtered in. By my final day, I needed to simply relax. So, I crossed La Rambla to a beach where vendors were selling cotton candy and candied apples, passing groups of friends passing around wine bottles. And then, laying a towel on the sand, "I claimed a prime spot in Montevideo's outdoor living room."