Qualla: Colón, Entre Ríos

Colón, Entre Ríos: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pablo D. Flores, Public domain. Fourteen kilometers of sand on a river is an unlikely thing in the interior of a continent, but Colón has it. The Uruguay River widens and slows here, depositing one of the longest beaches in the province along the Argentine bank, and a town of 23,000 has built a quiet vocation out of it: beaches, hot springs, a casino, and a national park of palm trees so old some of them predate the country. Across the water sits Paysandú, Uruguay, reachable by a long cantilever bridge. Colón is the kind of place people drive to in order to slow down.

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Image: Pablo D. Flores | Public domain

Colón, Entre Ríos: A President's Town, a Swiss Foundation

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rodrigo Paredes from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina, CC BY 2.0. Colón was founded on 12 April 1863 by General Justo José de Urquiza, the former caudillo of Entre Ríos who had become Argentina's first constitutional president. He raised it as a port to trade the produce of nearby Colonia San José, an agricultural colony he had also founded, se...

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Image: Rodrigo Paredes from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina | CC BY 2.0

Colón, Entre Ríos: The Provincial Capital of Tourism

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dario Alpern, CC BY-SA 4.0. Colón calls itself the Provincial Capital of Tourism, and for a city its size the title is earned. Visitors come for those long river beaches, for the thermal complex where hot mineral water fills a string of pools beside the Uruguay, for high-quality hotels and campsites, and fo...

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Image: Dario Alpern | CC BY-SA 4.0

Colón, Entre Ríos: Palms That Outlived Generations

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leandro Kibisz, CC BY-SA 4.0. About 60 kilometers from the city lies El Palmar National Park, created in 1966 to protect roughly 8,500 hectares of a vanishing landscape. Its protagonists are the yatay palms, Butia yatay, some standing up to twenty meters tall and counting more than three hundred years of grow...

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Image: Leandro Kibisz | CC BY-SA 4.0

Colón, Entre Ríos: The Bridge to the Other Shore

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dario Alpern, CC BY-SA 4.0. Colón does not sit at the edge of Argentina by accident; it sits at a doorway. The General Artigas Bridge, a cantilever span 2,350 meters long inaugurated on 10 December 1975, leaps the Uruguay River to connect Colón with Paysandú on the Uruguayan side. For travelers it is the pr...

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Image: Dario Alpern | CC BY-SA 4.0