Many visitors to Uruguay get no further from the capital, Montevideo, than the nearby resorts of Punta del Este and José Ignacio. Yet continue up the Atlantic coast towards the Brazilian border, and you’ll find some of this small South American country’s wilder and more bohemian charms, said Hugh Thomson in the FT.
On the southeast coast lies the “low-key” fishing village of Punta del Diablo, or Devil’s Point, “the sort of place where you can drink a cold beer and eat shrimp empanadas on the quayside after walking along empty beaches”. It also has an “outstandingly good” restaurant, Panes y Peces – “Bread and Fish” – where you can eat for a fraction of the price of equivalent gourmet restaurants in the south of the country. And the dunes next to it are so wild and “spectacular” that you needn’t venture far to feel as if you’re in a desert.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Still more secluded is Cabo Polonio, down the coast, a small community at the tip of a peninsula that’s home to a colony of sea lions. Cars are banned – you have to park and take a shared four-wheel-drive through the dunes to get there (look out for lapwings and nesting owls along the way). The settlement itself is “ramshackle”, with driftwood cabanas and so many “eccentric eco-structures” that it looks in parts “like a rest-home for Mad Max extras”. But it has “tremendous charm”, and an “attractive” hotel, La Perla, with an excellent seafood restaurant and a cellar stocked with good local wines.
Specialist tour operators include Plan South America (plansouthamerica.com) and Journey Latin America (journeylatinamerica.co.uk).
-
How Tesla has put Elon Musk on track to be the world’s first trillionaireIn The Spotlight The package agreed by the Tesla board outlines several key milestones over a 10-year period
-
Cop30: is the UN climate summit over before it begins?Today’s Big Question Trump administration will not send any high-level representatives, while most nations failed to submit updated plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions
-
‘The Big Crunch’: why science is divided over the future of the universeThe Explainer New study upends the prevailing theory about dark matter and says it is weakening
-
Bugonia: ‘deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable’Talking Point Yorgos Lanthimos’ film stars Emma Stone as a CEO who is kidnapped and accused of being an alien
-
The Revolutionists: a ‘superb and monumental’ bookThe Week Recommends Jason Burke ‘epic’ account of the plane hijackings and kidnappings carried out by extremists in the 1970s
-
Film reviews: ‘Bugonia,’ ‘The Mastermind’ and ‘Nouvelle Vague’feature A kidnapped CEO might only appear to be human, an amateurish art heist goes sideways, and Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’ gets a lively homage
-
Book reviews: ‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ and ‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’feature An examination of humanity in the face of “the Machine” and a posthumous memoir from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, who recently died by suicide
-
The dazzling coral gardens of Raja AmpatThe Week Recommends Region of Indonesia is home to perhaps the planet’s most photogenic archipelago
-
Salted caramel and chocolate tart recipeThe Week Recommends Delicious dessert can be made with any biscuits you fancy
-
6 trailside homes for hikersFeature Featuring a roof deck with skyline views in California and a home with access to private trails in Montana
-
Lazarus: Harlan Coben’s ‘embarrassingly compelling’ thrillerThe Week Recommends Bill Nighy and Sam Claflin play father-and-son psychiatrists in this ‘precision-engineered’ crime drama
