Semana Criolla del Prado

A country week with a secular name

Uruguay separated church and state early and thoroughly, and Holy Week in the calendar is Semana de Turismo, Tourism Week. It is the country's real spring break — the week when Montevideo empties towards the coast. What stays in the city, and fills up, is the Prado.

The Semana Criolla has been held there during that week since the 1920s; the Intendencia de Montevideo counted the 2025 edition as the ninety-eighth and the 2026 as the ninety-ninth. It is the city's annual appointment with the countryside, and for most of the people who come it is the only one they keep.

The arena and the pavilions

The ground is the Rural del Prado, whose great pavilions were opened on 25 August 1913 for the agro-industrial shows of the Asociación Rural del Uruguay, the sheds laid out in a fan around the arena. The architects were Buigas, Gómez, Ferrer and Auriot. It still does that job in September for the Expo Prado; in the week before Easter it does this one.

The centre of it is the jineteada: a rider takes an unbroken horse and has to stay on it, in the open, in front of everybody. The Intendencia has tightened what surrounds it — fewer rides, padded barriers in the arena, particular corralling materials for the horses, and spurs without points which the city supplies and checks.

Payadas, and everything else

Around the arena the week spreads out. The 2025 edition ran from ten in the morning to ten at night, with more than a thousand artists, over three hundred performances and workshops, and two hundred groups. There were five stages, one of them named for Carlos Molina and given over to payadas — improvised sung verse, two singers answering each other with a guitar, a contest as much as a song. Another carried the name of Alfredo Zitarrosa, another of Amalia de la Vega. There was an artisan fair of a hundred and sixty stands, an expo of a hundred and two social-economy enterprises, tango milongas, circus games for children, and meat over coals the whole way along.

Entry is free on the Sunday and Monday until nine at night. The rest of the week it costs a few hundred pesos, and children under five go in free.