Tom Womack

It's an hour on a fast ferry from Buenos Aires to the city of Colonia de Sacramento, built on the opposite bank by the Portuguese: as a haven for smugglers, if you ask a Porteño, or as a protest against Spain's unreasonably rigid colonial tariff regime, had you asked in Portugal at the time. It's a world heritage site, and the ferry terminal is five blocks from my hotel, so off I went, the skyscrapers of Puerto Madero - the new Docklands development of BsAs - receding.

The river is coffee-coloured, as were the non-opening windows of the catamaran. For a country populated by Spanish and Italian immigrants, the coffee here is strikingly watery, though I doubt the river is directly to blame.

Colonia is tiny - the world-heritage site, which is basically the area within the walls, is maybe four hundred yards on a side. It reminded me quite how awesomely filled with close-packed history Britain really is: this gate, which is apparently a site worth the journey, would have passed unmentioned in one of the walls of my old school.

Being once Portuguese, it has azulejas:

Otherwise, it has a bit of the aspect of Blakeney in the rain.

A nice evening meal: fish in a cream sauce with carrots, peas, pumpkins and chopped peppers. After three days of steak (glorious steak, tender and juicy and an inch thick, burned crispy bits on the outside and oozing jus when you cut it) accompanied by chips, a meal of more than one component was a nice change.

(Ruins of the old convent, from the top of the lighthouse)

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