Historic Quarter of Colonia del Sacramento
UNESCO-listed colonial quarter founded by Portugal in 1680, with nine small municipal museums.
Colonia do Sacramento was founded in 1680 by the Portuguese governor Manuel Lobo on a peninsula facing Buenos Aires across the Río de la Plata. Control passed between Portugal and Spain several times before the Spanish took the town definitively in 1777, and the two traditions are still legible in the street plan: irregular Portuguese lanes of cobbles that follow the ground, meeting the straighter Spanish blocks, with single-storey houses of whitewashed masonry, tiled roofs and wrought-iron grilles. The quarter was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1995.
Surviving monuments include the city gate and the reconstructed drawbridge on the line of the old walls, the Bastión del Carmen, the ruins of the seventeenth-century convent of San Francisco with the lighthouse of 1857 built into them, and the Basílica del Santísimo Sacramento on the Plaza de Armas. Nine small municipal museums sit within a few blocks and are covered by one ticket: among them the Museo Municipal, the Portuguese and Spanish houses, the tile museum, the Casa Nacional del Virrey and the Archivo Regional.
Highlights
- Cobbled Calle de los Suspiros and the Portuguese street plan
- City gate and reconstructed drawbridge of the old walls
- Lighthouse of 1857 among the San Francisco convent ruins
- Nine municipal museums on a single combined ticket
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