What is the name of the fictional city in Juan Carlos Onetti's novels?

The fictional city in Juan Carlos Onetti's novels is Santa María. It first appears in Onetti's 1950 novel La vida breve, published in English as A Brief Life, where it is imagined by the character Juan María Brausen. The town becomes the central setting of a large, interconnected fictional world.

Santa María is not meant to be a precisely mapped real city. Onetti gives it suggestive landmarks—a river, a port, a church, a hospital, and a colony of Swiss workers—but keeps its geography dreamlike and unstable. That ambiguity allows the town to function as both a recognizable provincial community and a symbolic space shaped by memory, isolation, and invention.

Readers often confuse Santa María with famous fictional Latin American settings such as Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Comala in Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo. Those towns belong to different authors and literary universes. Onetti returns to Santa María in later works including El astillero, Juntacadáveres, and Dejemos hablar al viento, making it one of the most distinctive recurring settings in twentieth-century Spanish-language fiction.