Punta del Este

Punta del Este is a peninsula with a river on one side and an ocean on the other, and the two waters explain the whole town: the Mansa, the calm river beach where the Río de la Plata finally gives up being a river, and the Brava, where the Atlantic arrives with its wave and where five concrete fingers rise from the sand — La Mano, the sculpture of 1982 that became the emblem of the coast. Around this point, Uruguay built its summer court: the port with its sea lions and sailboats, the lighthouse of 1860, the towers of Gorlero, and, along the coast to the east, a string of villages that grew from fishing to fashion.

The traveller swims the Mansa in the morning and the Brava in the afternoon; takes the boat to Isla Gorriti for the calm and sails past Isla de Lobos, one of the continent's largest sea lion colonies; drives to Punta Ballena for Casapueblo, the white house Carlos Páez Vilaró built by hand over forty years, and stays for the sunset ceremony he wrote for it; crosses the wave-shaped bridge at La Barra; eats fish at José Ignacio under its lighthouse; and, if it comes in winter, watches for right whales from any high point on the shore.

The Guide's honesty: in the season — Christmas to the end of January — the town belongs to Buenos Aires and São Paulo, and prices triple, tables vanish and the sea is the only place with room; March and April are the secret, warm and empty; winter closes many doors and opens the whales; the wind is a permanent resident and the water on the Brava side is colder than it looks; and Punta is honest about being a stage — its pleasure is exactly that, and it does not pretend otherwise.