I thought I was going mad. Actually I thought my smartphone was going mad.

It had never failed once in automatically updating timezone when travelling around the world. You switch it on and it picks up the correct date & time. Like any other smartphone.

So I just couldn’t understand why it didn’t work in Uruguay. My phone said “7:35pm”, all clocks around me showed “6:35pm”. I checked the settings, they were ok. No obvious reason for the behaviour. I wasn’t bothered enough to ask any locals.

Then the Eureka moment came: a German expat I spoke to yesterday mentioned that this year for the first time Uruguay is not adopting daylight savings. That would explain! My phone settings are only aware of the expected daylight savings, which would have made Uruguay time a GMT -2. While we are now on GMT -3.

Apparently this decision is the result of an initiative of the Chamber of Tourism, which claims that daylight savings have an adverse effect on tourism.
While this reasoning puzzles me a bit, I now feel better as the mistery is resolved. And I am sharing this trivia info with you ;-)