Uruguay
Uruguay Geography & Climate
Geography
Uruguay is about 176,000 square kilometres of gently rolling grassland — the eastern edge of the pampas. There are no mountains; the high point, Cerro Catedral, is barely over 500 metres, and the ridges the country calls cuchillas are low ranges of hills rather than anything steeper.
Water does the defining. The Uruguay River forms the entire western border with Argentina, the Río Negro cuts the country in half east to west and is dammed for hydroelectricity, and the south opens onto the Río de la Plata — a river mouth so wide that the far shore is invisible and the water is brown fresh water at Colonia and salt Atlantic by Punta del Este.
The coast runs roughly 600 kilometres from the river to the Brazilian border: calm river beaches in the west, then the open Atlantic east of Punta del Este, with long dune systems and coastal lagoons behind them in Rocha.
Land use is overwhelmingly cattle and sheep pasture, with soy and eucalyptus plantations expanding. There is essentially no forest cover of any age, which is itself a fact about how long this has been grazing country.
Climate Patterns
Uruguay is temperate, and it is the rare South American country with four genuine seasons. They run southern-hemisphere: summer December to February, winter June to August.
Summer is warm rather than fierce — generally 25 to 30°C, occasionally into the mid-30s — with high humidity near the coast and Atlantic breezes that make the beaches comfortable.
Winter sits around 10 to 15°C by day and can drop close to freezing at night. It rarely snows and never settles. The problem is not cold but damp and wind, and many older buildings are poorly heated, so it feels colder indoors than the numbers suggest.
Rain is spread fairly evenly through the year rather than concentrated in a wet season, coming as fronts rather than daily downpours.
Wind is the constant. The pampero, a cold dry southwesterly, arrives behind storms and can drop the temperature sharply in an hour; on the open Atlantic coast the wind is a permanent feature rather than an event.