Punta del Este (Uruguay)

December 2019 itinerary link

I had arranged to pick up a rental car from the airport because the rate was cheaper there than in downtown, and we would have to go to the airport the next morning to return home. The quote we had received from Advantage arranged through Travelocity.com was $55. When we got to the airport, we found out Advantage dumped our reservation on Eurocar, and they wanted $160.00 for the one day rental! Long story short, Travelocity picked up the difference, and we were off in the most expensive standard car we ever rented.

It was a pleasant 90 minute drive: a half of it in the field with trees with nobody in sight, and, the other half along the coast.

Map of Uruguay political

The first thing we noticed as we got closer to Punta del Este was 3-4 cruise ships moored in the bay. It is a popular stop in the Brazil to Chile cruise route, I learned. This town of 8,000 people add 300,000 more people during their summer months.

Punta del Este is supposedly the Monaco, Hamptons, or Miami of South America. Having lived in Honolulu and currently living in Los Angeles near the beach, I am not easily impressed by modern beach resort towns. Punta del Este seemed like a nice clean town with 20 miles of sandy beach. But I did not feel we were in a paradise or in a special place.

I thought we’d have a nice sea food lunch, look around, and go to Casapueblo, my real destination of the day. A restaurant named Rustic was my choice, but Google kept saying we’d arrived at the spot where there was no restaurant of any kind. It was a really hot day, and we were getting tired. So we just walked into a fancy diner type place. They had a nice bakery, and the food was not bad. Ouch! Very expensive. This is not a cheap town.

There are two art centers I would visit if we ever go back. One is a modern art museum, Museo Ralli. The other one is the art complex founded by the sculptor Pablo Atchugarry.

I lifted this photo from Wikipedia to show a better perspective of Punta del Este. We did not feel like walking around under the scorching sun, thus, we left this town.

We first drove 15-20 minutes to Punta Ballena lookout pictured above.

From there we could see Casapueblo, a whimsical dwelling built by an artist Carlos Páez Vilaró in 36 years. He started with a wooden beach house, then, added more rooms and floors each year. Now there’s a museum and a hotel in the 13 story complex.

There were a lot of people surrounding the building trying to take photos. Then there were tour buses, too. Instead of fighting the crowd, we bought the restaurant package that was offered at the front gate of the hotel and slipped in. We took the stairs down to get to the lobby and then took the elevator down to the restaurant. Casapueblo is often compared to Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona, but, unlike Gaudi, Carlos Paez-Vilaro was not an architect. I could just picture an artist going wild with his imagination with an enormous toy house.

The restaurant package worked like this: you pay about $15-20 upfront at the gate, and when you get to the restaurant, you get that much food credit. We sat at one of the tables on the balcony, and the view was just gorgeous all around. I could tell Paez-Vilaro hand picked this spot himself. This is what he said about the house:

“I built it [Casapueblo] as if it were a habitable sculpture, without plans, especially at the request of my enthusiasm. When the municipality recently asked me for the plans that I did not have, an architect friend had to spend a month studying how to decipher it.

— Carlos Páez Vilaró.^[11]

It is mind boggling to think he added a bit by bit each day and one day it’s become a 13 story building unlike anything else! Of course each unit or room in the complex is different from any other. I’d love to spend a couple of nights there and see some of the rooms. Sunrise and sunset would be just magical, too. (The museum holds a sunset ceremony everyday.)