Qualla: Laguna Garzón Bridge

Laguna Garzón Bridge: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marcelo Campi from Costa de Oro, Uruguay, CC BY-SA 2.0. From above, it looks like a mistake, or a doodle: a complete circle of roadway floating in the middle of a coastal lagoon, traffic peeling apart on one side and rejoining on the other, with open water in the hole at its center. There is nothing wrong with it. The ring is the entire point. When the architect Rafael Viñoly was asked to span the Laguna Garzón, where the Maldonado and Rocha departments meet, he refused to give the coast a fast, forgettable straight line. He gave it a curve that makes you brake, steer, and notice where you are. Since December 2015 the circular bridge has carried cars across a lagoon that, until then, you could only reach by a two-car ferry that ran only in daylight and only in good weather.

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Image: Marcelo Campi from Costa de Oro, Uruguay | CC BY-SA 2.0

Laguna Garzón Bridge: The Argument Against a Straight Line

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jimmy Baikovicius from Montevideo, Uruguay, CC BY-SA 2.0. A conventional bridge would have been cheaper and faster to drive. That was exactly the worry. The Laguna Garzón sits in one of the most pristine coastal stretches of Uruguay, a fragile screen between the developed beaches near Punta del Este and the wilder, emptier coast of Roch...

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Image: Jimmy Baikovicius from Montevideo, Uruguay | CC BY-SA 2.0

Laguna Garzón Bridge: Steel, Concrete, and a Ring of Water

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jimmy Baikovicius from Montevideo, Uruguay, CC BY-SA 2.0. The numbers behind the ring are substantial. Construction ran from September 2014 to December 2015 and consumed roughly 450 tons of steel, 500 cubic metres of concrete, and 40,000 metres of cable. The bridge cost about eleven million dollars, ten million of it underwritten by the...

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Image: Jimmy Baikovicius from Montevideo, Uruguay | CC BY-SA 2.0

Laguna Garzón Bridge: A Gateway to the Quiet Coast

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jimmy Baikovicius from Montevideo, Uruguay, CC BY-SA 2.0. What the bridge really opened was access to a coastline that had been deliberately hard to reach. For decades the ferry was a bottleneck, and that inconvenience kept the Rocha side sleepy. The ring changed the math without throwing the doors wide: it connects the two shores while...

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Image: Jimmy Baikovicius from Montevideo, Uruguay | CC BY-SA 2.0

Laguna Garzón Bridge: An Architect Who Crossed Oceans

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fedaro, CC BY-SA 4.0. The man who drew the ring was a long way from home, in a sense, and very close to it in another. Rafael Viñoly was born in Montevideo and grew up in Argentina before building a career in the United States, where his name went on towers and concert halls and convention centers aro...

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Image: Fedaro | CC BY-SA 4.0