Santa Teresa

Santa Teresa National Park was established in 1927 in the department of Rocha, on the Atlantic coast of north-eastern Uruguay, near the Brazilian border, and protects some 30 km². It is the oldest protected area in the country.

Its origin is military and heritage-based: the park was created around the Fortress of Santa Teresa, begun by the Portuguese in 1762 and finished by the Spanish, one of the largest colonial military works on the River Plate, which changed hands several times during the disputes between the two crowns and which was restored in the twentieth century.

Alongside the fortress an ambitious forestry and landscaping project was developed: over practically bare dunes, millions of trees were planted over decades and an arboretum was created with thousands of species from all over the world, along with rose gardens, greenhouses and a nursery, in what constitutes one of the greatest deliberate landscape transformations in Uruguay. The park thus combines planted woodland, native scrub, dunes, lagoons and Atlantic beaches, and it is managed by the Uruguayan Army, an unusual administrative arrangement for a protected area.