the end of the 18th century, Montevideo remained a fortified area, today known as Ciudad Vieja.
19th century
On 3 February 1807, British troops under the command of General Samuel Auchmuty and Admiral Charles Stirling occupied the city during the Battle of Montevideo (1807), but it was recaptured by the Spanish in the same year on 2 September when John Whitelocke was forced to surrender to troops formed by forces of the Banda Oriental�roughly the same area as modern Uruguay�and of Buenos Aires. After this conflict, the governor of Montevideo Francisco Javier de El�o opposed the new viceroy Santiago de Liniers, and created a government Junta when the Peninsular War started in Spain, in defiance of Liniers. El�o disestablished the Junta when Liniers was replaced by Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros.
During the May Revolution of 1810 and the subsequent uprising of the provinces of Rio de la Plata, the Spanish colonial government moved to Montevideo. During that year and the next, Uruguayan revolutionary Jos� Gervasio Artigas united with others from Buenos Aires against Spain. In 1811, the forces deployed by the Junta Grande of Buenos Aires and the gaucho forces led by Artigas started a siege of Montevideo, which had refused to obey the directives of the new authorities of the May Revolution. The siege was lifted at the end of that year, when the military situation started deteriorating in the Upper Peru region.
The Spanish governor was expelled in 1814. In 1816, Portugal invaded the recently liberated territory and in 1821, it was annexed to the Banda Oriental of Brazil. Juan Antonio Lavalleja and his band called the Treinta y Tres Orientales ("Thirty-Three Orientals") re-established the independence of the region in 1825. Uruguay was consolidated as an independent state in 1828, with Montevideo as the nation's capital. In 1829, the demolition of the city's fortifications began and plans were made for an extension beyond the Ciudad Vieja,
