Arrival: Casapueblo
The day ends not in Punta del Este proper but thirteen kilometres to the west, at Casapueblo on the Punta Ballena headland, where the timing of arrival matters. The building was begun in 1958 by Uruguayan artist Carlos Páez Vilaró on a cliff he bought for next to nothing when the land had no roads, no utilities, and no trees. Over the following thirty-six years, without architects or plans, he shaped it by hand from whitewashed cement and stucco: thirteen floors, no straight lines inside, terraces at every level overlooking the Atlantic. He modeled it consciously on the mud nests of the hornero, Uruguay's native ovenbird. What he created became his home, his atelier, his museum, and eventually a hotel — and one of the most visited sites in the country. Páez Vilaró, who died here in 2014 at ninety, was the father of one of the survivors of the 1972 Andes plane crash: he spent months searching the mountains of Argentina and Chile for his son, an experience that marked everything that came after.
Every afternoon since 1994, as the sun nears the water, the museum plays a recording of Páez Vilaró's own voice reading a poem addressed to the sun — what he called the Ceremonia al Sol. It is worth arriving early enough to find a place on the terraces before it begins.