Montevideo is the capital of Uruguay, in southern South America. It is a port city on the south coast, on the wide water of the Río de la Plata, and it is the country's centre for government, work, and daily life. Everyone agrees that the first part, monte, comes from Spanish or Portuguese for hill, after a well-known hill to the west of the city. After that, people tell different stories. One popular story reads the rest as a kind of short code, MONTE-VI-D-E-O, 'the sixth hill from east to west'. Another says a Portuguese sailor shouted Monte vide eu — I saw a hill. Scholars do not treat either extra story as proven, so the honest account stops at hill plus an ending nobody fully agrees on. The ending is not the English word video.