La Paz, Uruguay
Encyclopedia
La Paz is a small city in the Canelones Department
Canelones Department
The Canelones Department , with an area of and 485,240 inhabitants, is located to the south of Uruguay. Its capital is Canelones.-Geography and climate:...

, southern Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...

. It is located 2.5 kilometres (1.6 mi) east of Route 5
Route 5 (Uruguay)
Route 5 is a national route of Uruguay. In 1975, it was assigned the name Brigadier General Fructuoso Rivera, a national hero of Uruguay. It is one of the most important highways in country, along with Route 3, connecting Montevideo in the south with Rivera in the north and passing through the...

 on the border with Montevideo Department
Montevideo Department
Montevideo is a department of Uruguay.It is by far the smallest one in area, and the most populated as well. It contains the city of Montevideo, capital of Uruguay. While most of the department is covered by the capital city, there are still smaller towns within its limits, e.g...

. It belongs to the wider Montevideo Metropolitan Area
Montevideo
Montevideo is the largest city, the capital, and the chief port of Uruguay. The settlement was established in 1726 by Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, as a strategic move amidst a Spanish-Portuguese dispute over the platine region, and as a counter to the Portuguese colony at Colonia del Sacramento...

.

History

La Paz was founded in 1872 as a resort for the middle-class people from Montevideo. However, it was soon overshadowed by other neighborhoods of the Uruguayan capital city.

Today La Paz is better known as a place for the exploitation of granite
Granite
Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...

. This material was used in subsequent years for the expansion of the cities of Montevideo, in Uruguay, and Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

, in Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

.

The city is also known for its meat industry.

Population

La Paz has a population of 19,832 (as of 2004 census).
Year Population
1963 13,203
1975 14,653
1985 16,209
1996 19,547
2004 19,832

Source: Instituto Nacional de Estadística de Uruguay

External links

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