The liking it, or the impending doom? I liked it as it’s down to earth and relaxed, the people are kind, and it has a lot going on in and around arts and culture, all over the place.
The impending doom - environmentally, they’ve problems. Tainted aquifers, severe topsoil erosion bordering on desertification from overgrazing, vast eucalyptus monocultures. Economically - they have a final salary pension scheme that everybody scams (e.g. we’ll pay you 30% of your normal wage for your last three years before retirement and then 400% for your final year), and a huge black market with Brazil - people smuggle everything from toilet paper to cars, and it’s universal and normal. They are resorting to foreign agribusiness investments to bridge their deficit, and that only worsens the environmental degradation. Mercosur could go a long way to solving Uruguay’s woes, but it suits the bigger players better to keep Uruguay on a tight leash.
I really recommend the interior - Salto, Carmelo, Fray Bentos, Tacuarembo (Patria Gaucha festival was kinda fascinating - all the gauchos and their families ride in from all over for a week of rodeo and country activities - it’s very much for them, not tourists, so you’d better like steak, beer, and watching people get kicked in the face by horses), Paysandu - charming little cities with lots to explore around them. We loved San Gregorio do Polanco - sleepy little town smack in the middle of Uruguay on a huge reservoir, covered with art, all slightly offbeat, beaches and swimming when there’s water, galloping bareback across the dried up lakebed, startling flamingos, when there’s not.
Coast-side, Punta del Diablo is a cute little beach town, but as you near Montevideo it just slowly gets more built up and crappy, until you reach Punta del Este, which is a sort of micro-Miami.
Montevideo itself is great, interesting, cosmopolitan city, and generally really safe - but it’s a mistake to treat it as representative of Uruguay as a whole.
