Montevideo Wheels: the Museo del Automóvil

I’m not a car guy, but whenever I visit Uruguay I’m always on the lookout for the classic cars known here as cachilas - at one time, the greatest assortment of antique automobiles this side of Havana. Once common on the road, now mostly parked to attract attention outside the fancier restaurants in Colonia del Sacramento or confined to private collections, they are only rarely taken out for a drive. Many have been sold to collectors outside the country, despite export restrictions.

Yesterday, in search of cachilas I hadn’t seen, I took a walk to the Automóvil Club Uruguayo’s Museo del Automóvil in the capital of Montevideo. In the course of many visits to the city, I had inexplicably failed to see it - part of that failure I can ascribe to inconvenient hours and weekend trips when it was closed - but I was pleasantly surprised to find an assortment of motor vehicles that I knew only by name - such as a 1910 Hupmobile (pictured here) and a 1920 Stutz Bearcat. There were also some I’d never heard of, such as a 1904 Clement Bayard, a 1910 Panhard Levassor, and a 1967 Rago - a rarely produced Uruguayan sub-sub-compact.

Perhaps the most memorable item in the museum, though, was a vehicle (pictured here) outfitted to run on the "alternative fuel" of charcoal rather than gasoline in the 1940s. Uruguay has always had energy problems - unlike neighboring Argentina and Brazil, it has neither oil nor natural gas - and during World War II petroleum supplies were limited indeed. Uruguay's dilemma is a reminder that, in a world where fossil fuel supplies are declining and political problems can limit access to those that still exist, we need to look beyond the age of oil.

On the sixth floor of the Automóvil Club’s downtown parking garage, the museum clearly gets few visitors - you need to sound a buzzer to get in - and there’s one solitary staff member who provides loving maintenance to every vehicle on the floor, all of which are still in running order. There’s still a cottage industry in restoring these vehicles and those who are interested can see some of the parts in the nearby Casa López (pictured here, at Cerro Largo 1259), which also sports a classic Ford racing car from the 1930s in its showroom.

Uruguayan Wheels

For most of the 20th century, Uruguay had a limited industrial base that never included automobiles, which were invariably imported at great expense. One result of this, still visible on the streets of Montevideo, Colonia, and other Uruguayan cities, was the survival of antique autos known as cachilas, about which I wrote an earlier post. Because of foreign collectors, these mobile tourist attractions are gradually disappearing from Uruguayan streets, roads and highways, though many remain in private local collections and museums open to the public.

Soon, though, cachilas will no longer be Uruguay's only automotive export. Last year, a Chinese-Argentine-Uruguayan consortium began production of Tiggo vans, which are already on the street in Montevideo. Within a month, the first units will be crossing the River Plate to take their chances in Argentine traffic.

Days of Wine and Cachilas

One of the wine world's best-guarded secrets is Uruguay, where a handful of family-owned boutique wineries specialize in the deep red Tannat, originally from the French Basque country, in the vicinity of Montevideo. I'm spending the next several days in and around Montevideo, visiting seven or eight of them in the process, to update and expand the coverage in my Buenos Aires guidebook, which includes excursions to the Uruguayan capital.

One of those wineries is Bodega Bouza, barely ten minutes from downtown Montevideo but a world apart where verdant vineyards surround handsome brick buildings that now include a stylish restaurant and tasting room. On cruise ship days, it can serve upwards of a hundred people, but today I had it almost to myself.

Wine isn't everything here, though. In a custom-built addition, there's also an automobile museum where Juan Luis Bouza has assembled a fleet of classic cachilas, as Uruguayans call the cars that were imported for so many years (unlike neighboring Argentina and Brazil, tiny Uruguay never had an automotive industry). When I last visited Bouza, three years ago, most of these cars looked like wrecks, but now they seem as if they just came off the assembly line. Bouza's collection also includes a sample of vintage motorcycles.

All cars imported prior to 1946 used right-hand drive as, with the strong British influence here, Uruguayans originally drove on the left. Immediately after World War II, though, Uruguayans started to drive on the right and all newer vehicles have left-hand drive.