Fantastic......Grand 19th-century market building filled with bustling, meat-centric restaurants & bars.The Mercado del Puerto is a gastronomic and cultural tour of Montevideo , Uruguay .

History:

According to historians Fernando O. Assunção and Iris Bombet Franco , in 1865 a joint-stock company was established at the initiative of the merchant Pedro Sáenz de Zumarán with the aim of building a market in Montevideo . With this purpose, the land was purchased on the north coast of the bay, in the area known as "El Baño de los Padres", part of the block limited by the current streets Pérez Castellanos, Piedras, Maciel and Rambla August 25, 1825 .

One of the initial steps on the part of the businessmen was to consult the English engineer RH Mesures about the viability of designing a metal construction on iron bases, a technique absolutely unknown in America , but which was beginning to be applied in Europe . The use of iron skeletons in architecture would be definitively established in 1889, when Gustave Eiffel built the tower that bears his name in Paris .

The engineer Mesures had to supervise the metal castings carried out in the workshops of the Union Foundry of KT Parkin, in Liverpool , and then travel to Montevideo with a squad of first blacksmith officers to direct the work. The original framework was built on the masonry work of the French builder Eugenio Penot . Construction took three years.

It was inaugurated on October 10, 1868 with the assistance of the President of the Republic, Lorenzo Batlle and members of his ministerial cabinet. Its destination was as a market supplier of fruits, vegetables and meats to the ships that arrived in the Montevideo bay and to the wealthy families who at that time built their mansions in the surroundings. The fruit shops, greengrocers and butcher shops became, over the years, the now famous and talked about places for food and drinks.

The motley metal structure of the Port Market has been the scene of the most diverse encounters. Carlos Gardel and Enrico Caruso walked together through its internal streets; José Enrique Rodó used to drink his "caflitas" there in a hidden coffee cup; Pedro Figari took from there several of the scenes that inspired his paintings.

Parallel to the real story of the Port Market, other non-true stories circulated. It was said that around 1800 the iron structure of what was going to be a railway station in Bolivia was passing through the port of Montevideo in transit . Since the destination country had not paid the necessary expenses to complete the transaction, the English company that owned it would have decided to auction it off in Montevideo. There is also another version that maintained that the Mercado iron was, in its primitive and original destination, a railway station that was to be built over a city on the Pacific Ocean . The ship carrying the cargo would have been shipwrecked on the coasts of Maldonado or Rocha , and in these circumstances a group of Montevideo capitalists would have decided to acquire the abandoned material for little money and use it for the construction of a market....