negotiated the
Portuguese Empire's annexation of the Banda Oriental at the
Congress of Utrecht in 1713-15. The following years saw an expansion of the Portuguese settlements around Colonia del Sacramento, until 1723, when Field Marshal Manuel de Freitas da Fonseca of Portugal built the Montevieu fort. As a reaction, on 22 January 1724 a Spanish expedition was sent from Buenos Aires, organized by the
Governor of Río de la Plata,
Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, who forced the Portuguese to abandon the location and founded and fortified
Montevideo. The Spanish started populating the city, initially with six families moving in from Buenos Aires and soon thereafter by families arriving from the Canary Islands who were called by the locals "gauchos" or "canarios". In this way Montevideo became the center of Spanish control over the Banda Oriental. Its government was carried out by the Cabildo, in which
criollos (locally born people of pure or mostly Spanish ancestry) could participate. In 1750, the office of the
Governor of Montevideo was created, with jurisdiction in the southern departments of modern Uruguay. The rest of the territories of modern Uruguay, along with part of the modern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul remained under the jurisdiction of the Superintendencia de Buenos Aires, while another part of the territory of the Banda Oriental at the northwest was governed by the authorities of the Missions. The Portuguese, having lost the possibility of building a fort in Montevideo, established the
Fort of San Miguel in 1737 and then the much larger
Fortaleza de Santa Teresa in 1762 on the Atlantic coast of the current
Rocha Department, in order to keep a route open for their southward advances into the sparsely populated territories of the Banda Oriental. The
Treaty of Madrid (13 January 1750) between the kings of Spain and Portugal, allowed further expansion of the Portuguese Empire west of the 46th meridian. The treaty also stipulated that Spain would receive Colonia del Sacramento and Portugal would receive the
Misiones Orientales. This, however, resulted in the
Guaraní War (1754–1756), after which the
Treaty of El Pardo (1761) repealed all aspects of the previous treaty.
Spanish–Portuguese Wars The
First Cevallos expedition was a military action between September 1762 and April 1763, by the Spanish forces led by Don Pedro Antonio de Cevallos, Governor of Buenos Aires, against the Portuguese in the Banda Oriental as part of the
Seven Years' War. The Portuguese territories of Colonia del Sacramento were conquered by the Spanish and the Anglo-Portuguese forces were defeated and forced to surrender and retreat. Colonia del Sacramento and the nearby territories came under Spanish control until the Treaty of Paris (1763), by which all the territory conquered by the first Cevallos expedition was given back to Portugal. Santa Tecla, San Miguel, Santa Teresa and Rio Grande de São Pedro, however, remained in Spanish hands, which became the cause of further Portuguese attacks. At the conclusion of the
Spanish–Portuguese War of 1776-1777, by the
First Treaty of San Ildefonso, Spain returned the island of Santa Catarina to Portugal and recognized Rio Grande de São Pedro as Portuguese territory, but kept the Colonia del Sacramento, along with the Banda Oriental, and the Misiones Orientales. In this way the Banda Oriental became integrated into the
Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata (1776–1814). The line that separated the Spanish from the Portuguese territories, however, was a sinuous one, lacking any natural formations to define it precisely, and underwent various changes during the next decades. In 1796, the body of the Blandengues was formed to protect the ranchers and peasants from vagrancy, theft and contraband. The government, lacking resources, offered to pardon any outlaws that would join this body, and they in turn brought also their horses into it. ==19th century==