🇦🇷 Argentina · The Northeast and Mesopotamia
Colón is one of the best-loved tourist towns in Entre Ríos, on the bank of the Uruguay river, on the border with Uruguay. It combines broad sandy beaches on the river, a large thermal complex, a charming old town and the closeness of El Palmar National Park, which makes it an ideal base for exploring the whole Uruguay river micro-region.
The hot springs are one of the great draws: a complex with numerous pools (indoor and outdoor), water at different temperatures, slides and water games, built as much for relaxing as for family fun. Add to that the beaches and islands on the river, ideal in summer, and a strong tradition of sport fishing and water sports.
Colón also has a historical, heritage side: it began around 1863 with Swiss, French and Italian settlers brought in under the colonization drive led by Justo José de Urquiza, and it keeps that immigrant-town air along its riverfront and in its streets. The General Artigas international bridge links it with Paysandú, in Uruguay, a few minutes away. Hot springs, beaches, history and nature, all in one place: that is why many consider it a capital of tourism in Entre Ríos.
Colón was founded on 12 April 1863, when governor Justo José de Urquiza laid the foundation stone of the school building, as the port for the farming colonization zone he himself was driving. The first settlers —Swiss, French and Italian— established themselves with his backing and gave rise, together with neighboring San José, to one of the first organized farming colonies in the country. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Mesopotamian province between the Paraná and the Uruguay: land of Charrúas and Minuanes, stronghold of the federalism of Urquiza —the victor of Caseros—, cradle of Argentina's Jewish and Swiss colonies, of hot springs, palm groves and the carnival of Gualeguaychú.
Read the history of Entre Ríos →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Walk down to the riverfront in Colón on a summer evening and, over the murmur of the Uruguay river, you will hear surnames that sound nothing like the pampas: Bousquet, Chapuis, Roulet, Chappuis. They are direct echoes of a migration experiment that, more than a century and a half ago, brought whole families to this corner of Entre Ríos from the Swiss Alps and Savoy to turn the bush into farmland. That mix of river, settlers and working the soil explains why Colón, today a town of hot springs and beaches, has a European air you will not find in other towns along the river. The history of Colón is closely bound to Justo José de Urquiza, the caudillo from Entre Ríos who was the first constitutional president of the Argentine Confederation and later governor of the province. Around the middle of the 19th century, Urquiza pushed an ambitious farming colonization project: bringing European immigrants to settle and work the land of Entre Ríos, at a time when Argentina was barely beginning to organize itself as a country and desperately needed labor and people rooted in the land.
That is how the first Swiss, French and Italian settlers reached the region, establishing themselves with Urquiza's help and under his protection. These pioneers founded one of the first organized farming colonies in the country, Colonia San José, next door to present-day Colón, and shaped an area of smallholdings, vineyards and land work that changed the character of Entre Ríos. Most of the Swiss settlers came from the canton of Valais, an Alpine region of farmers and herders used to working difficult soils; French Savoyards and some Germans joined them, arriving after long sea crossings from Europe and then by cart from the port into the interior of the province. The early years were brutally hard: they had to clear the bush, cut tracks, put up rough houses and learn to live with a climate and a soil completely unlike the ones they came from. That immigrant inheritance can still be felt in the region, in its surnames, its food (the cured sausages, the cheeses, the European baking recipes) and its traditions, which today sit alongside the criollo and Entre Ríos identity of the rest of the province.
Colón was born as the port and urban center of that colonization zone. A provincial law of 9 May 1862 authorized the founding of a town next to Colonia San José, and on 12 April 1863, with governor Urquiza himself present along with his ministers and the parish priest Lorenzo Cot, the foundation stone of the school building was laid: that day is taken as the founding of the town. Local tradition keeps a good story about the name: one of Urquiza's men is said to have remarked 'A reckless venture, this one, General... this is like discovering lands the way Columbus did', to which Urquiza replied: 'You have said it yourself: Colón is what this town shall be called'. The town emerged as the natural outlet on the Uruguay river for the produce of the farming colonies inland, above all Colonia San José: the settlers needed a nearby port from which to ship their harvests to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and the shore where Colón stands today, with good water depth and a natural bluff, turned out to be the ideal site.
The Uruguay river was, from the start, the axis of life in Colón: immigrants and European goods came in that way, and farm produce —wheat, flax, farm goods— went out toward the great ports of the Río de la Plata. The town grew in an orderly fashion, on the grid plan typical of 19th-century town planning, with its riverfront promenade and its port, keeping that neat, placid air of towns founded by European immigrants, very different from towns founded in the Spanish colonial period. Over the decades, Villa Colón established itself as the head of its department and the service center for the whole micro-region, while the inland colonies kept producing. In time, a new calling would be added to its role as port and farming town, and it would end up defining the town's identity today: tourism, first tied to the river and the beaches, and later, well into the 20th century, to the thermal waters that would change its economy for good.
Facing Colón, on the other side of the Uruguay river, sits the Uruguayan city of Paysandú. For centuries the two banks looked at each other across the water, joined by culture, trade and family ties but separated by the river: before the bridge, you crossed by raft or launch, a slow business at the mercy of the weather and the current. That distance was closed for good in the second half of the 20th century, as part of an ambitious binational plan of physical integration between Argentina and Uruguay that also included other bridges over the Uruguay river, such as the Fray Bentos-Puerto Unzué crossing (Libertador General San Martín) and the Salto-Concordia one.
The General Artigas international bridge, after several years of construction, opened on 10 December 1975. More than two kilometers long, it is one of the three road crossings linking the province of Entre Ríos with Uruguay, and it connected Colón directly with Paysandú, only a few kilometers and a few minutes of travel apart. At the time the work was a symbol of modernization and of both countries' will to tighten economic and social ties in the Uruguay river region. Since then the two cities have worked almost as a twinned pair: many people cross daily to work, study, shop, visit family or enjoy the hot springs and beaches on the other bank, an everyday bond that few international borders in the world allow. Fairs, festivals and even sports teams tend to cross from one city to the other, reinforcing that sense of a binational community that defines Colón and Paysandú.
Over the decades, Colón stopped being merely a farming port and turned into one of the great tourist destinations of Entre Ríos. Its broad beaches on the Uruguay river, the closeness of El Palmar National Park, its sport fishing tradition, its islands, its National Crafts Festival and, above all, the arrival of the hot springs, made it a benchmark for tourism in the province. The turning point was the drilling and exploitation of thermal water, which spread along the whole Entre Ríos bank of the Uruguay river from the end of the 20th century, following the model other towns in the region, such as Federación and Concordia, had already tried with success. Colón opened its own municipal thermal complex, today one of the most visited in the province, with a dozen pools of water at around 32 to 40 degrees and a water park that fills with families every season.
That bet gave Colón a powerful new draw, able to bring in visitors all year and not only during the beach summer: from autumn to winter the hot springs work as a place to unwind, and from spring to summer the river, the beaches and February's National Crafts Festival, which gathers artisans from all over the country, are added to the mix. On top of that comes the enormous natural draw of El Palmar National Park, created in 1966 a few kilometers from town to protect one of the last great yatay palm groves in the country, with thousands of century-old palms, capybaras and a biodiversity that attracts photographers and nature lovers from all over the world. Today the town combines that modern, thermal side with its immigrant-town inheritance: hot springs, beaches, nature, history, the closeness of Uruguay across the Artigas bridge and the river behind it all, a mix that many sum up by simply calling it the tourism capital of the Uruguay river.
Two landmarks, one natural and one cultural, gave Colón its present shape as an all-round tourist destination. The first is El Palmar National Park, created by National Law 16,802 —passed in late 1965 and published in January 1966— on the bank of the Uruguay river to protect one of the last significant strongholds of the yatay palm grove (Butia yatay), a palm species that barely two centuries ago covered enormous stretches of the Entre Ríos and Corrientes riverlands and that farming and cattle raising all but wiped out. Today the park protects more than 8,000 hectares of savannah with palms that can be over 300 years old, a landscape that impressed naturalists and travelers from the 19th century onward, Charles Darwin among them, who mentioned the Entre Ríos palm groves in his writings on the voyage of the Beagle.
The second landmark is cultural: the National Crafts Festival, which started as a small local fair in the late 1970s and grew into one of the most important crafts gatherings in the country, with national standing. Every February, right in Parque Quirós, hundreds of artisans working in plant fiber, ceramics, wood, leather, textiles and metal show and sell their work, backed by a full program of popular music and folk. The festival established Colón as a cultural hub of the Entre Ríos summer, on top of its already solid reputation for hot springs and beaches. Between the hot springs, the beaches, El Palmar, the crafts and the crossing to Paysandú, Colón built in a few decades a complete and varied tourist offer, one that sets it apart even within a province —Entre Ríos— that lives largely off thermal and river tourism.