It was a normal day at the office when, suddenly, my colleague—and now friend—Augusto asked me, “Haven’t you seen Tiranos Temblad?” No, I hadn’t. And then I struck gold.

Let’s give this some mystique.

It all began when Agustín Ferrando Trenchi and Fernanda Montoro, a Uruguayan couple—an audiovisual producer and a photographer—watched a video in December 2012 in which a Montevideo resident angrily described how, just days after Christmas, a woman was brazenly stealing flowers from the central flowerbed of Bulevar Artigas, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. He also announced that he was going to post the video on Facebook. The account of this petty assault on public ornamentation fascinated them. They realized that no one was doing anything with this kind of material. Three days later, Tiranos Temblad was born.

Before going any further, I should say this: Uruguay is a magical country. The last bastion of democracy in South America—not only as a political system, but as a way of life. It has legal marijuana and abortion, marriage equality, and, in 2025, it legalized euthanasia. And this is hardly a recent development. More than a century ago, for instance, Uruguay became one of the first countries in the region to legalize divorce, in 1913. The separation between church and state is significant enough that Holy Week is officially known as “Semana de Turismo”—Tourism Week. People are laid-back, and everything seems to move at a different pace. Uruguayans have a way of speaking that is so beautiful and florid that, not for nothing, they are a nation of poets.

That said, let’s get back to it.

In the style of those old newsreels that used to be shown in cinemas, Tiranos Temblad is a weekly chronicle of Uruguayan happenings whose name comes from a verse of the national anthem (that can be translated as “Tyrants, tremble!”). What its creators discovered was an enormous amount of material uploaded to YouTube that portrayed Uruguay and the everyday lives of its inhabitants in the most diverse, mundane, and utterly bizarre ways. The project also had a simple idea at its core: to show that, contrary to the widespread notion that “nothing ever happens in Uruguay,” plenty actually does. There were videos from tourists, families singing at a barbecue, government officials inaugurating a streetlight, a pig drinking soda, and foreign students explaining how to make a chivito (a typical Uruguayan sandwich).

I want to talk about Tiranos, as we usually call the channel, not only because I think everyone should know about it, but also because it offers a portrait of the transformation the internet has undergone over the past fourteen years. When the project began, YouTube was rawer. Everything ended up there: homemade birthday videos, UFO sightings, curious things caught on camera in the street, and pets playing. People uploaded all of it without much ambition beyond sharing it with friends. Of course, there were already channels and professional content creators. But let’s remember that until 2013, YouTube’s slogan was “Broadcast Yourself.”

And out of that great funnel, as Ferrando himself aptly describes it, came endearing characters such as the Uruguayan Spider-Man, the Peteca from Valizas, Mamama, and Talaman. All of it was set to music by the extraordinarily talented composer Luciano Supervielle.

Facebook was the dominant social network at the time, and Tiranos grew by word of mouth. It became a phenomenon. Eventually, videos began appearing of people delighted to discover that they had made it into an episode. Until 2016, the show came out weekly, always following the same principle: search the internet for whatever had happened in Uruguay that week and see what turned up. Since then, there have been annual compilations. In the most recent editions, we can see more material coming from social networks such as Instagram and TikTok. Perhaps the raw internet has moved there—up to a point, at least.

Every episode, which runs between ten and thirty minutes, follows roughly the same structure. The opening shouting “¡Hola, Uruguay!”; the important events of the period; foreigners’ Spanish homework; things people say about Uruguay, followed by a Uruguayan’s verdict—approved or disapproved; the mystery of the week; the star (crack) of the week; musical discoveries; my personal favorite, the “What the fuck” moments; and, finally, the closing song: “Gracias YouTube, por todo lo que nos das”—“Thank you, YouTube, for everything you give us"—inspired in the Uruguayan film director’s words, Fernando Moreno.

Every now and then there is a special episode devoted to a particular event, such as the World Cups, or, this year, Uruguay’s inauguration of a roller coaster after thirteen years without having one. That shows us that Tiranos remains faithful to its original spirit: documenting the great events of Uruguayan life while keeping things family-friendly and steering clear of potentially divisive subjects such as football and politics.

Agustín Ferrando is the public face of the project because he is the one who narrates every episode. He describes Tiranos as an extension of his personality and has explained in several interviews that Tiranos never went away and never will; it simply operates on a different timetable. Its creators have never made money from the project, and producing it requires many hours of work, from selecting the material to editing the episodes. This is why its frequency has diminished. For ten years, from 2015 to 2025, Ferrando also produced the weekly roundup for Cartoon Network, Otra semana en Cartoon (“Another Week on Cartoon”), and he has other YouTube projects with Montoro, including Analizando Humanos (“Analyzing Humans”).

In a special episode devoted to the 2024 opening of an exhibition celebrating Telecataplum, the legendary Río de la Plata comedy program, Ferrando explained that the show had been a major influence on him. Telecataplum began in 1962 and ran for many years, launching some of the biggest names in Río de la Plata comedy.

During its 1980s editions, it had recurring segments, one of which involved taking a camera into the streets and filming curious things happening around Montevideo. Agustín says, “They taught me that if you pay attention, everyday life is full of interesting details.” Like the episode in which, thanks to a drone video, we discovered that the Obelisk on Avenida 18 de Julio, when seen from above, is actually a giant mate. It reminds me of Isaac Bashevis Singer. He used to say that he didn’t write fiction because everyday life was already fantastic.

As I finish writing this article, Tiranos surprises us on a Sunday night with a new episode, dedicated to nostalgia. On August 24, the eve of Uruguay’s Independence Day, the entire country celebrates Noche de la Nostalgia, a night of parties featuring music from the 1960s and 1970s.

YouTube is now twenty-one years old and, as Agustín points out in this latest episode, genuinely finding real content is becoming increasingly difficult. AI-generated videos, content creators with enormous budgets, and videos with enormous titles but very little actual content have taken over the platform.

He reflects that, although he feels deeply nostalgic for the YouTube of 2013, perhaps ten years from now we will feel the same nostalgia for this era—an era filled with images that look like plastic and titles designed almost exclusively to generate clicks.

One of Tiranos’ great discoveries is the song “Uruguay” by Russian composer and musician Aleksey Igudesman. Its lyrics, written in beautiful, rudimentary Spanish, go: “Uruguay es el mejor país, mejor que Francia y mejor que París”—“Uruguay is the best country, better than France and better than Paris.” This is the absolute truth. And that’s saying something, considering that when he wrote the song, he hadn’t even seen Tiranos Temblad.

Notes

Tiranos Temblad. TiranosTembladTV, YouTube. Canal oficial.
Urbana Play 104.3 FM. (2022, June 22). “Tiranos Temblad es una extensión de mi personalidad”: Agustín Ferrando Trenchi. YouTube.
Urbana Play 104.3 FM. (2025, April 23). “No encontraba un lugar en los medios convencionales”: Agustín Ferrando de Tiranos Temblad. YouTube.