Long before any flag flew here, the grasslands belonged to the Charrua and Minuane peoples, indigenous nations who moved across this open country following game and season. Spanish Jesuits came, then Portuguese and Italian immigrants through the 19th century. In 1810, as the Spanish colonies of the Rio de la Plata edged toward independence, Portuguese troops under Diogo de Sousa, Count of Rio Pardo, pushed into the region to claim its coveted temperate land and founded the settlement around a chapel dedicated to the patron saint, Sant'Ana. Permanent settlement followed land grants in 1814, and the town was formally founded on 30 July 1823, becoming a municipality in 1857 when it broke away from Alegrete.

What makes Livramento extraordinary is not its age but its openness. The community is woven so tightly to Rivera that the two function as one urban organism of nearly 170,000 people, and in 2009 the Brazilian government formally declared Santana do Livramento the symbolic city of Brazil's integration with the Mercosur nations. Citizens of both cities move anywhere they like across the twin community. The shared central park and the obelisk of the Plaza Internacional mark the spot where the two countries meet without dividing. Only those continuing deeper into the other nation must complete formalities at the integrated control post, opened in 2016 at Siñeriz Shopping in Rivera, where Brazilian and Uruguayan officials now share a single building.

Livramento once boomed. Great woolen mills, refrigeration plants, social clubs, and soccer teams rose during decades of prosperity, and in 1912 the city opened the first railway station in Brazil to carry international traffic, linking Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo all the way to Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Because Brazilian and Uruguayan tracks ran at different widths, the station became a break-of-gauge point where freight and passengers changed trains at the frontier. The international line is silent now, the economy long since faded by isolation and a reliance on farming and trade. Yet the bones of that ambitious era still shape the streets, a city that once dreamed of being the bridge between two railway nations.

Santana do Livramento sits where the 31st parallel crosses Brazil, a latitude that turns out to be ideal for the grape. The Campanha is rolling cattle country, all leather and ranch life, but it has become serious wine territory too, with Almadén and Santa Colina among its larger wineries drawing on the same temperate climate that once lured the Portuguese. The city celebrates with a festival of lamb and wine and an international kite fair, and on 20 September the gauchos commemorate the Ragamuffin War that shaped this proud frontier identity. To stand in a Livramento vineyard at dusk is to look across rows of vines and, beyond them, another country glowing on the horizon.

Not every line here is settled. A wedge of land between the Quarai River and the Arroio Invernada, known as the Rincao de Artigas, has been claimed by Uruguay since 1934, a quiet cartographic disagreement in a community otherwise defined by its openness. Faith here is layered too. Most residents are Roman Catholic, but Pentecostal churches have grown rapidly, and within the city's diversity sit followers of Umbanda, Kardecist spiritism, and small communities of other creeds. The university presence is large for a city this size: seven higher-education institutions, among them campuses of the Federal University of Santa Maria and the Federal University of Pampa, fill the streets with students. Even the Uruguayan consulate stands on the Brazilian side, one more sign of how thoroughly two nations have learned to share a single town.