Uruguay
The territory that became Uruguay was settled late. The Portuguese held Colonia del Sacramento from 1680 to 1777, where accounts were kept in réis and gold moedas and pesos circulated side by side, while Spanish Montevideo, founded in 1726 as a garrison port, kept its books in the silver peso of eight reales struck at Potosí and Lima, with gold escudos and onzas as the large-value coin; there was no mint in the Banda Oriental, and much of the small money in circulation was worn macuquina. Because the town was a military plaza and, after 1776, a key port of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, an unusual density of records survives for so small a place: the minutes of the Cabildo, the notarial registers of the Escribanía de Gobierno y Hacienda, Real Hacienda accounts, the receipt books of the Franciscan Third Order, and the correspondence of the Audiencia of Buenos Aires now in Seville. The interest for a record of creative expenditure is that the payments are small and human — a few pesos to a young organist for a Holy Week procession, a violinist’s monthly wage in a notarised contract — and that the city’s first theatre was financed not by patrons but by a governor diverting regimental silver.
Gold weight and purity converter →Making a film here? The Canada–Uruguay corridor covers the treaty, the incentives, and where to start.