Vacation in the raw
Uruguay’s eclectic beach towns are perfect for adventurous travellers who love pristine nature and a low-key vibe
The road into Punta del Diablo started out normal enough. My husband and I were making our our way to the most northeastern of Uruguay’s beach towns, a place far off the vacation track for most Canadians. Even for some Uruguayans, since it’s a solid four-hour drive from the capital, Montevideo, and just a few kilometres from the Brazilian border.
At first, the road was paved. There were a few regular-looking houses on large lots, a couple of mercados – grocery stores – and a large, treed campsite. Then some youth hostels, their large porches clearly ready for all-night hangouts. More houses, closer together, some looking as if they’d been built from scrap materials, others closer to Dwell magazine modernism.
Suddenly, we appeared to be driving through the vendor and food-stall section of a large, disorganized music festival. The road had changed from asphalt to packed dirt and there was an almost impenetrable crowd of people milling around in front of our car. Young gods in dreadlocks carrying surfboards, families trailing kids, dozens of bronzed teenagers, locals carrying plastic grocery bags. There were restaurants with wonky wooden decks and hand-lettered signs pressed up to the sidewalk-less road. Ramshackle stalls selling straw hats, beach wraps, jewellery, blow-up water toys and gourds for mate, a traditional hot drink.
Then, as we inched forward through the mob – the Atlantic. The grey-green waves unfurling down a long curved cove. Men winching small wooden fish boats out of the water and onto the beach. A horse and cart pulling away from the fishmongers’ stalls.
So, definitely not the Hawaiian island of Maui, or Sayulita, Mexico, or Italy’s Ligurian coast, or Venice Beach, Calif., or any other seaside community we’d ever been to. As we would continue to discover, travelling up and down the coast, Uruguay’s small towns and their beaches were nothing like anything we’d seen before.
My decision to visit Uruguay, a country of only 3.8 million wedged between giant neighbours Argentina and Brazil can be traced to a film I’d seen at the Vancouver film festival several years before. Por el camino, by Argentine director Charly Braun, is a road-trip movie that threw together a flaky young Belgian woman and a more conventional, upper-class Argentine man in search of various people and places in Uruguay. Predictably, the characters fell in love.
The more unexpected journey in the film was their geographic one, filled with scenes of rolling green hills, farming towns populated by gauchos with sun-weathered walnut faces and beaches facing a vast expanse of ocean. It put Uruguay onto my daydream list.
And now, here we were, trying not to mow anyone down as we crawled along the oceanfront and up the hill to our Airbnb cottage, a place that turned out to be far less hippie-casual and more upscale-tourist than I had anticipated. In fact, it was one of three cottages that had been built on a single lot – one of many similar clusters – to cater to the Argentine, Brazilian and European travellers who have begun discovering this small piece of South America in the past few years.
A lot of vacationers still don’t venture any further than Punta del Este, the condo-packed resort city a couple of hours from Montevideo.
But more adventurous ones have trickled northeast along the highway to places such as La Paloma, La Pedrera, Cabo Polonio, Barra de Valizas, Aguas Dulces, and our first destination, Punta del Diablo.
It’s a part of the world best suited to those who love big nature and a small-town feel, one that combines some of the customs of Europe (Uruguay was heavily influenced by Spanish, Italian and Basque settlers) with the casualness of the New World. Uruguay is considered by many travellers to be the Switzerland of South America, a country with free education, liberal attitudes – abortion and the production and sale of marijuana are legal – and an apparently large and contented middle class.
That would be enough to make Uruguay seem familiar to Canadians, but it has the added element of vast, unpopulated spaces punctuated by small towns and only the occasional city. I sometimes felt as if I was in the greener, hillier parts of Alberta, except with palm trees, pampas grass and exotic birds.
For sure, the northeastern region of the country is not for people who want or need standard tourist services at all times. Except for La Paloma, a port that is the biggest and least attractive of these shore towns, none has any conventional hotels or more than one cash machine, pharmacy, paved road or gas station, if that.
One impromptu settlement, Cabo Polonio, doesn’t even have electricity or, really, any roads at all. This offbeat enclave of shacks and small houses clustered around a lighthouse in a national park makes do with solar panels and whatever supplies can be trucked in with off-road vehicles or horses.
The beaches are the biggest lure. Every town has at least two, if not three, distinct beaches – pristine, gorgeous scalloped coves bordered by dunes and grasses, the sand pounded to velvet by the waves.
At Punta del Diablo, there was the busy, crowded one we saw the first day, Playa de los Pescaderos.
The surf-rental shacks are there and the snack shacks, and the families taking their toddlers in to jump the waves. Young men play never-ending beach-soccer games, and leathery couples bake themselves to mahogany.
We hung around there to people watch, and so my husband could hone his surfer skills on the not-too-big, not-too-small waves that crashed evenly on this “easy” beach, the one for the beginners. We’d go for an espresso afterward at the rickety Costa Mar across the road and watch the boats coming in, the crowds gathering to watch crates of fish being unloaded.
Playa Grande, to the northeast, was much emptier. With just a smattering of people, it was a place where you could walk the beach in peace, contemplating, as we did on our afternoon there, the single windsurfer, the Peggy’s Cove-like boulders of the point ahead and the unusual sky in this part of the world, where the brilliant afternoon sun turns it almost white.
Playa de la Viuda was southwest of the town centre, hidden behind large dunes and almost completely empty, apparently there just for the enjoyment of the residents of the few discreetly swish small hotels facing it.
But there’s more than just the beaches to these towns. Every one of them has a main street that turns into a pedestrian stroll and street party in the evening. In Punta del Diablo, when we’d had enough of the beach, it was where we went every day to get lunch or shop for supplies: fresh fish from the boat, floppy woven-grass hats to protect us from the intense sun, the basics from the cluster of small grocery stores.
At night, the main street turned into a small party, as people filled the outdoor tables and others rambled by, everything permeated by the sound of music emanating from many of the restaurants.
One night, as we ate our meal of crab, followed by roasted chicken with herbs and rice at the newly opened Déjà Vu, run by a French guy from Lille and a group of his French and Swiss friends, the live soundtrack was provided by a four-piece jazz group. Next door, we could hear a folk singer. That’s typical in these resort towns, as travelling musicians set up in one restaurant or another along the street.
After the beaches and the nightlife, the expeditions were the next biggest draw.
This is an area with a lot of nature, some of which the national government is working to preserve. Birds, turtles, sea lions, penguins, unusual types of trees, lagoons and constantly shifting dunes are just some of the things to see. Getting access to them sometimes requires effort and patience – tours fluctuate depending on whether guides are in the mood or whether a business is still in operation.
Just north of Punta was La Coronilla, the distinctly non-resort-like local-government town, all modest bungalows and gardens. One of its beaches is home to a large sea turtle population. A Uruguayan sea turtle-preservation group, Karumbe, has a small outpost on a lot opposite the beach, providing some information about the country’s sea turtle population, along with a small collection of turtle-themed knickknacks.
The information booth itself is not exactly turtle friendly, with desperate-looking captive turtles banging around in small plastic tubs set on the grass. But the volunteers – Manuela Calvo, the day I was there – do provide directions to the best places to see turtles in the wild. That’s either a few kilometres down the beach from the display or nearby at the large Santa Teresa National Park just to the southeast, which is worth a visit in itself, complete with a 17th-century fortress and huge camping spaces.
Near Barra de Valizas, halfway between Punta and the much more upscale and manicured La Pedrera an hour’s drive away, you can take a boat ride up the river to see the Bosque de Ombues – a forest of strange, ghostly trees unique to this part of the continent. The boat tours start at the bridge on the highway just south of Barra, although it’s best to check with a local host or the tourist-information office to confirm the times. The town also has spectacular horseback-riding tours along the beach or into the dunes.
Barra de Valizas itself has the biggest dunes on the coast, a seductive attraction for anyone who visits. Even we couldn’t resist, wading through the small gulch that separates the main beach from the dunes, and then chugging our way up these small sand mountains until we got to the rocky plateaus at the top. (Young, fit visitors sometimes keep going along the top and cross over into Cabo Polonio National Park, a 2 1/2-hour hike.)
And then there’s Cabo Polonio, a phenomenon unto itself. There used to be the occasional truck/dune-buggy contraption that would take people on the 30-minute trip across the dunes and along the beach to the point. Now, there’s an elaborate entryway, a parking lot that can hold several hundred cars, a small museum, a café and a fleet of truck-buggies that cost about $10 a person, round trip.
We joined one of the 30-person convoys on a Sunday afternoon. My husband was concerned that the trip was going to be boring, no doubt because of my habit of stopping to read every educational sign about flora and fauna in our own national parks. But the ride turned out to be anything but. As the truck plowed through the dunes, it swayed back and forth at times like a boat about to capsize in a heavy storm. People screamed occasionally. When we arrived, we were met by a scene reminiscent of Nevada’s annual Burning Man festival, with houses, hostels, vendor stalls and eating/drinking hangouts that all appeared to have been built by whatever someone could haul in on a donkey.
As it turned out, there was lots to explore, even in this tiny settlement. The more touristy part of Cabo Polonio is the northern shore, where everyone gets dropped off. The day trippers pack the beach and the restaurants of every variety. There were places that looked like campsites and there was La Perla del Cabo, where we had one of our best meals in Uruguay, complete with a selection of unusual breads to start, a quinoa-crab appetizer and creamy risotto with seafood.
But the scene on the south side was much calmer. The houses there, Greek-village white, looked sturdier, as though someone with a passing knowledge of building codes might have been involved. It was clearly the beach favoured by locals. The only bar, partway up the hill, was a low-key, open-air hangout filled with couches and loungers where you could easily spend an afternoon contemplating the ocean.
And then there was the point itself. All day, every time we meandered closer to the cabo of Cabo Polonio, I could hear excited screams, as though there was a high-stakes soccer game going on somewhere nearby. Finally, I realized it wasn’t people yelling or a soccer game. It was the sea lions, dozens of them barking madly away on the rocky islands just off the point, a part of Uruguay’s still unspoiled nature that continues to thrive.
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If you go
There are no direct flights to the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, so pick your airline according to whichever stopover seems the least painful. If you’re flying from Central or Eastern Canada, the most common transfer points from Toronto are Sao Paulo, Panama or Santiago. From the West, several U.S. airlines have flights that connect through Dallas and Houston.
Buses from Montevideo to the coastal towns are frequent, modern and comfortable. There are also numerous car rental agencies in Montevideo and prices are reasonable.
WHEN TO GO
The high season, when things are the most expensive and crowded, falls between Christmas and the end of January, even though Carnival extends to the end of February. We found mid-February to have enough people to provide bustle but not so many as to be overwhelming. The locals told us that the water is warm enough for swimming even in April or May. Many places close for the winter, though locals told us that more are starting to stay open at least on weekends.
WHERE TO STAY
All towns have a wide range of vacation rentals, usually available through Airbnb. The nicer hotels in Uruguay, as in Italy, come with a breakfast, often a hearty one, including scrambled eggs, ham, cheese, toast, croissants, fruit, cakes and coffee.
La Pedrera
Brisas de La Pedrera. This is the boutique hotel that kicked off interest in the northeastern stretch of Uruguay’s coast in 2009. Operated by very friendly Laura Jauregui, who divides her time between La Pedrera and her home in the United States, the two-storey building set among upscale homes close to the beach feels like a modern convent – all tranquility and restful whites. From $130 (U.S.) a night in low season.
Barra de Valizas
Posada Valizas is one of the few non-camping, non-youth hostel, non-bungalow choices in this all-dirt-road town that is the least developed of all the popular beach towns. The inn has the feel of a French farmhouse, with its low ceilings, small bedrooms around the living room, and bright white kitchen. The owner, Cecelia Ribo, made special arrangements for us to have dinner at a restaurant run out of a friend’s house, which was a special experience. From $80 a night, low season.
Punta del Diablo
Posada la Viuda del Diablo. Part of a chain of small, luxury hotels, this inn doesn’t allow children and is clearly meant for people who want to stare at the ocean from the loungers on their decks and take long, romantic walks along the beach. From $125 a night, low season.
Posada Lune de Miel. One of a new style of developments in town, it features a set of cottages around a pool. Set in the eastern, more suburban-feeling part of town, it’s a short distance from Playa Grande. From $65 a night, low season.
PLACES TO EAT
Bon Appetit-style fine dining flourishes in Punta del Este and Jose Ignacio to the southwest, but the best you can expect at most restaurants in the northeastern towns are the kind of meals that a very enthusiastic friend with a good cookbook might make. Lots of pasta and rice dishes and many seafood specialties, along with the usual steaks.
Punta del Diablo
Il Tano. This restaurant, set in a small house in a residential section of the town, has excellent pastas (ravioli stuffed with seaweed in a cream sauce was my choice) and a comfortable deck for whiling away the afternoon or evening.
Lo de Olga. This really is run by a woman named Olga. A pleasant lunch spot on the main street with a big wooden deck and lots of local favourites: seaweed fritters, fried calamari, rice with seafood, chicken or pork.
Déjà Vu. Opposite the police station, this specializes in a French/Belgian take on cuisine. Crepes for dessert, French touches on the seafood and meat dishes. There’s a house-party atmosphere at this place run by four young men, who advertise their beer as “colder than the heart of your ex.”
Barra de Valizas
Proa. The restaurant on the beach. Local fish dishes, based on the catch of the day, and very tasty seafood risotto.
Masamadre. A restaurant run by Robert Orquet out of a house on a side street. Very intimate. It was a flat 700 pesos ($35 Canadian) a person for dinner, which included pâté, shark with capers or roast pork with blueberries, and lemon pie, plus wine.
La Pedrera
La Jau. A Basque restaurant that is off the busy, pedestrian-only main street, in a small house, with items like crab fritters, and roast pork with smashed potatoes topped with cheese.
La Candombera. A pizza place on the side street Avenida de los Indios that consists of an oven and a collection of rickety tables in an open-air café. Great pizza and very warm, fun atmosophere. Cash only.