🇺🇾 Uruguay · Montevideo and surroundings
Ciudad de la Costa is, in many ways, the beachy, residential face of the Montevideo metropolitan area. Just cross the Carrasco stream heading east and the capital city gives way to a long succession of wooded resort towns that stretch along the coast of the Río de la Plata: Carrasco Este, Solymar, Lagomar, El Pinar, Shangrilá, Lomas de Solymar... names of resorts that over time stuck together until they formed a single, young and explosively growing city, where thousands of families chose to live near the river and the greenery without moving away from the capital.
It's not a monumental destination or one of great tourist attractions: its charm is another kind. It's that of a quiet coast, of pine woods and sand, with calm, warm Río de la Plata waters —gentler than the ocean surf—, perfect for families with children. It's that of a coastal rambla where people walk, cycle, fish and drink mate watching the sunset over the river. And it's that of convenience: being steps from Carrasco Airport and minutes from downtown Montevideo, with all services at hand.
This guide explores Ciudad de la Costa with a practical and warm eye: which beaches to choose, how to make the most of its rambla, how to get around between its resorts and how to use it as an alternative base, more relaxed and close to the beach, to combine with the capital. It's an ideal destination for those seeking coastal rest without giving up the closeness of the big city, or to start or end the trip peacefully by the airport.
The history of Ciudad de la Costa is the recent history of the growth of the Canelones coast east of Montevideo. Unlike the country's old colonial cities, this is a very young one: for much of the 20th century the area was made up of a series of independent resort towns —coastal subdivisions forested with pines and eucalyptus from the mid-20th century— that grew as summer spots and second homes for Montevideans. Resorts such as Solymar, Lagomar, El Pinar and Shangrilá were born with that vocation for rest along the Río de la Plata, on lands that were once fields and dunes. Over the decades, the improvement of communications (the Avenida Giannattasio, the coastal Rambla, the Ruta Interbalnearia) and the appeal of living near the river and the greenery led many people to move permanently. Those resorts gradually merged physically and administratively until, well into the 21st century, they consolidated as a single city: Ciudad de la Costa, one of the fastest-growing in Uruguay. Its history, then, is that of metropolitan expansion and of how the summer dream of the coast became a bedroom and residential city full of life. The full history of the region and the department is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The department that surrounds Montevideo: scene of the battle of Las Piedras in 1811, land of the Costa de Oro and its seaside resorts, winemaking heart of tannat and the capital's great market-garden and farming belt.
Read the history of Canelones Department →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before becoming the densely populated city it is today, the coastal strip of southwestern Canelones, east of the Carrasco stream, was a very different landscape: fields, dunes, riverside woodlands and a low, sandy coast on the Río de la Plata, sparsely inhabited. The region is part of the department of Canelones, one of the oldest and most populated in Uruguay, traditionally tied to the agricultural, wine-producing and farming production that supplied nearby Montevideo.
For much of its history, this coast was a rural, pass-through area, crossed by the roads that linked Montevideo with the east of the country. The Río de la Plata, that immense estuary that bathes the whole southern Uruguayan coast, marked the natural boundary of the region. The closeness to the capital —just across the Carrasco stream— would be, over time, the decisive factor that would completely transform this territory.
In the early 20th century, while Montevideo was living its great expansion and modernization, the resort of Carrasco, at the eastern edge of the capital, was consolidating as an elegant residential and summer area. That summer impulse, which had already 'discovered' the value of the coast, would soon jump the Carrasco stream and advance eastward, over the fields and dunes of Canelones, giving rise to the first coastal subdivisions that would be the seed of Ciudad de la Costa.
The true origin of what is today Ciudad de la Costa lies in the coastal subdivisions and land parcelings promoted from the mid-20th century. Real-estate companies and developers divided the fields and dunes of the Canelones coast, east of Montevideo, into lots to sell as summer and second-home plots, taking advantage of the appeal of the beach and the closeness to the capital.
To fix the sands and give shade to those bare dunes, much of the area was forested with pines and eucalyptus, which over time became the landscape hallmark of the region: wooded resorts, with streets among the pines, very different from the original open country. Thus were born, one after another, the resorts that make up the present-day city, each with its name, its stamp and its own subdivision: Solymar, Lagomar, El Pinar, Shangrilá, Parque del Plata, Lomas de Solymar, San José de Carrasco and others.
In their first decades, these resorts had a markedly seasonal life: they filled up in summer, when Montevideo families came to spend the season in their summer houses, and stood almost empty the rest of the year. They were places of rest, beach and pine woods, designed for summer leisure rather than permanent life. But that seasonal nature would begin to change profoundly as communications with Montevideo improved and the appeal of living year-round beside the river and the greenery grew.
From the last decades of the 20th century, the Canelones coastal strip east of Montevideo experienced an accelerated transformation. What had been summer resorts began to be populated permanently: more and more Montevideo families chose to move there for good, drawn by the possibility of living near the river, among the greenery and the pines, with a home of their own and at the same time a few minutes from the capital and its sources of work.
Several factors drove that growth. The improvement and consolidation of the routes of communication —the Avenida Giannattasio, the coastal Rambla and, above all, the Ruta Interbalnearia, which connects quickly with Montevideo— shortened the distances and made daily commuting viable. The closeness to Carrasco International Airport and to the Carrasco resort, together with land prices more affordable than in the capital, did the rest. The resorts kept growing and, literally, merging with each other, until the boundaries that separated them were erased.
That process of merging and growth led to the group of resorts being recognized as a single urban entity: Ciudad de la Costa, made official as a city well into the modern period and turned into one of the most populated and fastest-growing towns in Uruguay. From that summer dream of subdivisions beside the river thus arose a large bedroom and residential city, fully integrated into the Montevideo metropolitan area, whose history is, to a large extent, the history of the capital's expansion over the coast.
Today's Ciudad de la Costa is a young, extensive and peculiar city: it has no historic center or classic founding core, but is structured as a succession of resorts along the coast and the Avenida Giannattasio. That dispersed, low-density, green morphology gives it an identity different from that of the traditional Uruguayan cities: it's a city of houses with gardens among pines, of tree-lined streets and of a strong relationship with the beach and the Río de la Plata.
Its life is deeply integrated with that of the Montevideo metropolitan area. Many of its inhabitants work or study in the capital and return to the coast to live and rest, in a constant daily flow. At the same time, the city keeps its summer vocation: in summer it welcomes those who come to enjoy its calm-water beaches, recovering something of the resort spirit that gave it its origin. It's, in a sense, two things at once: a permanent residential area and a coastal rest destination.
Without great monuments or spectacular tourist attractions, the appeal of Ciudad de la Costa is that of quiet life beside the river: the coastal rambla for walking and cycling, the wide sunsets over the Río de la Plata, the ritual of mate, the pine woods and the family beaches. Its recent history —that of some summer resorts that became a city— sums up well the way metropolitan Uruguay grew over its coast, turning the dream of the house by the sea into a place to live year-round.