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Uruguay Land Use and Settlement Patterns
Uruguay may be divided into four regions, based on
social,
economic, and geographical factors. The regions include
the
interior, the littoral, Greater Montevideo, and the coast.
The Interior
This largest region includes the departments of
Artigas,
Cerro Largo, Durazno, Flores, Florida, Lavalleja, Rivera,
Salto,
Tacuarembó, and Treinta y Tres and the eastern halves of
Paysandú, Río Negro, and Soriano. The topsoil is thin and
unsuited to intensive agriculture, but it nourishes
abundant
natural pasture.
Only 2 to 3 percent of Uruguay's land is forested. An
estimated 3 to 4 million hectares (17 to 23 percent of the
total
land) are arable, but only one-third of this (about 7
percent of
the total productive land) was cultivated in 1990. Almost
all of
the interior consisted of cattle and sheep ranches;
pasture
accounted for 89 percent of the country's productive land.
Sheep rearing was typically undertaken on medium-sized
farms
concentrated in the west and south. It began to boom as an
export
industry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,
particularly following the invention of barbed wire, which
allowed the easy enclosure of properties. Uruguayan wool
is of
moderate quality, not quite up to Australian standards
(see Livestock Ranching
, ch. 3).
Cattle ranches, or estancias, for beef and hides
were
typically quite large (over 1,000 hectares) and were
concentrated
in the north and east. (Dairying was concentrated in the
department of Colonia.) Because ranching required little
labor,
merely a few gauchos, the interior lacked a peasantry and
large
towns. Despite being sparsely populated, however, the
interior
was relatively urbanized in that the capital of each
department
usually contained about half the inhabitants. Social and
economic
development indicators were lowest for the departments
along the
Brazilian border to the northeast. Government attempts to
encourage agricultural colonization by means of land
reform in
the interior had largely failed in economic terms, as had
the
promotion of wheat production. One exception, rice, most
of which
was produced in the east, had become a major
nontraditional
export in recent years
(see Crop Production
, ch. 3).
Data as of December 1990
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