Uruguay’s Secular Image Softens as Iemanjá Fills Montevideo’s Shore

Thousands returned to Montevideo’s beaches last week to honor Iemanjá, the Umbanda goddess of waters, bringing flowers, fruit, and small wish boats. At the Río de la Plata sunset, secular Uruguay briefly shifts, and a public ritual becomes refuge.

Rambla as Sanctuary, With Drums Setting the City’s Pulse

The river looks brown at this hour, the Río de la Plata carrying its usual color as the sun begins to set. On the sand, blue and white candles wait in small holes, and the first thing that catches your eye is not flame but preparation. People arrive dressed in white and light blue, carrying flowers and fruit, and small boats loaded with desires so fragile they feel too delicate to name out loud.

From early afternoon into the night, the rambla becomes a moving line of the faithful, the curious, and tourists who drift closer once they hear the sound. Songs and dancing build and rebuild the atmosphere, and the atabaque drum keeps time in a way that makes the city’s usual distance from religion feel, for a few hours, like a story someone told too confidently.

Uruguay is often described as the most secular and least religious society in Latin America. Last week, on Monday, Montevideo did not contradict that label. It suspended it. The beach gathering shows how faith, tradition, and urban identity can unite, creating a shared sense of belonging without asking permission.

A grounded, everyday detail sits inside the spectacle. People form lines. They wait. They accept that waiting is part of the night, as it is in any city life, except here the reward is not a document or a ticket. It is a moment of contact.

Trance on the Sand and an Anchor Against Acceleration

On the beach, improvised terreiros serve as sacred spaces where attention and rhythm create a spiritual architecture. Mediums enter trance, receiving entities, while participants approach to receive axé-vital energy-and undergo spiritual cleansing. These cycles-approach, pause, blessing, step away-are repeated to reinforce connection and spiritual steadiness among the crowd.

For spiritual leaders at the shore, the festival is not framed as folklore. It is framed as emotional and family containment, a day with a specific social function. “Today is the day of the mother, of the mother of all the orisha, of all understandings, of the family,” the priest Caio told EFE.

He described Iemanjá as a figure capable of sending frequencies of calm to a society he perceives as accelerated, especially among adolescents and within divided families, and he described the festival as an anchor against the speed of modern life. What this does is turn the ritual into an argument about time. Not only sacred time, but daily time. The pace people feel in their homes, in their phones, in the small fractures that show up when families stop moving together.

In a social context where mental health has gained prominence, another priest, Juan Carlos de Oxaguian, emphasized Iemanjá’s specific role as a protector of life and connected that protection to the head and to mental health. “She takes care of our head, given how important our mental health is these days. So when there is stress, depression, it is with her that we have to walk,” he told EFE.

Then he pushed the message away from any material considerations. He insisted that spirituality should be detached from possessions and status, and that the connection to the divine is internal and free. “We do not need to be religious, and we do not need money, because faith is here inside, it is not in a wallet, nor in diplomas, nor in cars,” he told EFE.

The wording carries particular force in a city setting. Montevideo knows institutions. It knows credentials. It knows the quiet sorting that happens when people measure each other by work, schooling, and what they can afford. The wager here is that, for one night, the terms of value get rearranged. Faith is presented as something that cannot be purchased or displayed, only practiced.

Boats of Wishes and a Crowd Asking for Peace

As dusk settles, Playa Ramírez gathers into a long applause. The blue-and-white candles form a shoreline of small lights, symbolizing hope. People step into the water, accompanying the boats loaded with offerings to Iemanjá, entering a moment of collective reverence and hope.

The river is still brown. The air is cooler than it was earlier in the afternoon. The boats move outward, and the crowd follows them with eyes and hands and a careful kind of hope. This is the part that looks most like a postcard from a distance. Up close, it seems like concentration.

The celebration also becomes a loudspeaker for a wider plea. Mae Carmen de Oxala and priest Gerardo Devara call for calm, harmony, and consideration for human life amid global conflict. They ask for peace, emphasizing that life cannot be lived from war to war, fostering a sense of hope and reassurance.

Despite different strands present, participants describe the day as an act of unity. “It is a moment when all the people who come are celebrating the same thing in the same place. This does not happen during the rest of the year, and it gives us strength to start it,” practitioner Aimara Iglesias told EFE.

Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion rooted in the crossing of African traditions, Catholicism, and spiritism, venerates Iemanjá as a force of nature and a guiding spirit. Its roots trace back to enslaved Africans who brought their cults of the orisha to Brazil, and from there, it spread to Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay through migration and cultural exchange, highlighting its regional importance.

So the small boats in Montevideo carry more than flowers and fruit. They have a regional history of movement, survival, and blending. They have a way of naming calm in a time when people describe the world as accelerated. And for a few hours, in a place known for its secular self-image, the city accepts a different description of itself, told in drumbeat and candlelight and water up to the ankles.

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