Banda Oriental - The 18th Century

The 18th Century

The following years saw an expansion of the Portuguese settlements around Colonia del Sacramento, until 1723, when Field Marshal Manuel de Freitas da Fonseca of Portugal built the Montevieu fort. As a reaction, on 22 January 1724 a Spanish expedition was sent from Buenos Aires, organized by the Governor of Río de la Plata, Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, who forced the Portuguese to abandon the location and founded and fortified Montevideo. The Spanish started populating the city, initially with six families moving in from Buenos Aires and soon thereafter by families arriving from the Canary Islands who were called by the locals "guanches", "guanchos" or "canarios".

In this way Montevideo became the center of Spanish control over the Banda Oriental. Its government was carried out by the Cabildo, in which criollos (locally born people of pure or mostly Spanish ancestry) could participate. In 1750, the office of Governor of Montevideo was created, with jurisdiction in the southern departments of the modern Uruguay. The rest of the territories of the modern Uruguay, along with part of the modern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul remained under the jurisdiction of the Superintendencia de Buenos Aires, while another part of the territory of the Banda Oriental at the northwest was governed by the authorities of the Missions.

The Portuguese, having lost the possibility of building a fort in Montevideo, established the Fort of San Miguel in 1737 and then the much larger Fortaleza de Santa Teresa in 1762 on the Atlantic coast of the current Rocha Department, in order to keep a route open for their southward advances into the sparsely populated territories of the Banda Oriental.

The treaty of Madrid of 1750 between the kings of Spain and Portugal, allowed further expansion of the Portuguese Empire west of the 46th meridian. The treaty also stipulated that Spain would receive Colonia del Sacramento and Portugal would receive the Misiones Orientales. This, however, resulted in the Guaraní War (1754-1756), after which the Treaty of El Pardo (1761) repealed all aspects of the previous treaty.