Yaros

The Yaros were an Indigenous people of the lower Uruguay River. When the Spanish arrived they held the western bank, until the Charrúa pushed them south between the Negro and San Salvador rivers.

They lived without agriculture, pottery or the bow: they fished, hunted and gathered honey, pine nuts and carob pods, brewing a drink from pine seeds. Their only shelters were woven windbreaks.

The Yaros fought alongside the Charrúa against the Spaniards. Chronicles as early as 1612 record them, under the name Chayos, killing Captain Juan Ramón, an explorer sent up the Uruguay by Sebastián Cabot. Jesuits tried to settle them at the Yapeyú reduction from 1627 and founded San Andrés de Yaros in 1657, but its people walked away within a year, preferring nomadic life. Between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the Yaros were broken and absorbed by the Charrúa.