Near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) was used for the analysis of soil samples for silt, sand, clay, calcium (Ca), potassium (K), sodium (Na), magnesium (Mg), copper (Cu) and iron (Fe). A total of 332 samples of different soils from Uruguay (South America) were used. The samples were scanned in a NIRS 6500 (NIRSystems, Silver Spring, MD, USA) in reflectance. Cross validation was applied to avoid overfitting of the models. The coefficient of determination in calibration (R^2_{\rm cal}) and the standard errors in cross validation (SECV) were 0·80 (SECV: 6·8), 0·84 (SECV: 6·0), 0·90 (SECV: 3·6) in per cent for sand, silt and clay respectively. For both macro and microelements the R^2_{\rm cal} and SECV were 0·80 (SECV: 0·1), 0·95 (SECV: 2·9), 0·90 (SECV 0·8), for K, Ca, Mg in g/kg respectively, and 0·86 (SECV: 0·82) and 0·92 (SECV: 25·5) for Cu and Fe in mg/kg. It was concluded that NIRS has a great potential as an analytical method for soil routine analysis due to the speed and low cost of analysis.