Lavalleja is the department of the hills: Minas, the capital, is two hours from Montevideo on Route 8, which continues towards Treinta y Tres and Melo, and Routes 12 and 60 cross it towards Maldonado and Florida. The quarries and the cement factory move heavy trucks all year, and Villa Serrana and the Salto del Penitente attract weekend tourism. Urban fines are issued by the Intendencia and collected through SUCIVE; those on the routes, by the Policía Caminera.

Context and authorities

The framework is Law 18.191 on Traffic and Road Safety, which defines the infractions and expresses fines in adjustable units, and each intendencia applies them in its department through its transit office; on national routes the Policía Caminera acts. Fine debts are collected together with the vehicle tax through SUCIVE, the single system that unified collection across the nineteen departments, and they block the transfer and the renewal of the vehicle booklet.

The Intendencia’s Transit Directorate issues fines in Minas, José Pedro Varela and Solís de Mataojo, with load checks at the quarry approaches; a defence is filed with the Intendencia and payment is made through SUCIVE or at its offices. Fines on Route 8 outside the cities are issued by the Policía Caminera and are also collected through SUCIVE together with the vehicle tax.

What the API returns for this jurisdiction

In Lavalleja a plate is sent to the Uruguay fines API, which walks its integrated sources and returns each fine with the authority that applied it:

  • The authority that applied the fine and its number, unnormalised.
  • The date and reason, with the location if the source reports it.
  • The amount and status current at the source.
  • Which sources answered and which did not, on every lookup.

How to check a plate in Lavalleja

Manual verification starts at SUCIVE, which unifies tax and fine debts of the nineteen departments, and continues at the Lavalleja Intendencia portal for the detail of each fine and the defence. That round, repeated for every unit, is what the API replaces: one lookup per plate across the integrated sources, with the result per source.

What to watch if you run a fleet in Lavalleja

A fleet of cement or stone trucks descending to Montevideo on Route 8 piles up Caminera load and speed fines and those of the Lavalleja and Canelones intendencias on units rotating between drivers; looking up each plate at month end, with the result stored per authority, lets you assign them to the trip’s driver.

For a hill tourism company with vans climbing to Villa Serrana at weekends, the plate lookup before paying the vehicle tax prevents a forgotten fine from blocking the procedure.

How to integrate

Each vehicle is sent in a POST, with the jurisdictions to include if you do not want to query all of them. The response accepts the job and the result is retrieved by status lookup or arrives by webhook once the sources finish answering. The vehicle lookup quality guide explains how to handle a source that did not answer.

JSONIllustrative example, not a contract.
{
  "plate": "SBC1234",
  "jurisdictions": [
    "UY-LA"
  ]
}

Limits and considerations

  • Fines from the Policía Caminera on national routes are processed by the Ministry of the Interior and are also collected through SUCIVE.
  • Amounts in adjustable units are converted at the current value; the final amount is set by the intendencia at the time of payment.
  • A source that does not answer is reported as such, never as an absence of fines.
  • The API neither pays fines nor handles defences; it delivers information to decide.

Sources and further reading