Every afternoon, a few minutes before the sun touches the Atlantic, a voice crackles through the speakers at Casapueblo. It is the voice of Carlos Páez Vilaró - the artist who built this place with his own hands over the course of four decades - reciting a poem to the sun.
The crowd on the terrace goes quiet. It sounds like a cliché until you are standing there, watching the sky turn the color of embers over the Río de la Plata, surrounded by walls that curve and swell like waves of white plaster, and you realize there is no other place in the world quite like this.
Casapueblo is a hotel, a museum, a gallery, a café, a spa - and also something that resists all of those categories. Built on a rocky promontory about 13 km (8 miles) from the resort town of Punta del Este, it was designed by nobody and built by everyone: Páez Vilaró, his friends, and the local fishermen who helped him haul cement up the cliffs.
There are 13 floors, 72 units, and not a single straight line anywhere. The municipal authorities once asked for the blueprints. There were none. An architect friend had to spend a month just trying to draw what was already there.
Location
Casapueblo sits on the Punta Ballena peninsula in the department of Maldonado, about 130 km (80 miles) east of Montevideo. It is a 10-minute drive from Punta del Este's international airport, which receives direct flights from Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Santiago, as well as Buquebus ferry connections from Buenos Aires with onward bus transfers.
The peninsula owes its remarkable density of trees to a 19th-century shipping magnate named Lussich, who planted hundreds of thousands of them after his wife threatened to leave if something wasn't done about the Atlantic wind. Today the Lussich Arboretum - the second-largest in South America - forms a windbreak that makes the whole point feel improbably sheltered. Casapueblo occupies the cliff at its far edge, facing west into the last of the afternoon light.
The Accidental Masterpiece
In 1958, Páez Vilaró came to Punta Ballena for the first time and found a desolate landscape - no trees, no roads, no electricity, no running water. He was immediately smitten. He gathered friends and investors, formed a company called Club de la Ballena S.A., and acquired a plot of 4,874 square meters on the cliff. Then he put up a tin shed to store salvaged doors and windows, and started building.
"I built it as if it were a habitable sculpture, without plans, above all at the instigation of my enthusiasm," he once said.
The first structure was a wooden atelier he called La Pionera. Over the following years he covered it in cement and began shaping it with his hands - domes, tunnels, passageways, terraces - in what he described as the style of the hornero, the South American bird that builds cave-like nests from mud.
Rooms were added whenever friends announced they were coming to stay. The building kept growing. By the time it was complete - insofar as it was ever complete - it had taken 36 years and risen to 13 floors.
Páez Vilaró was not an architect. He was a painter, ceramist, muralist, sculptor, filmmaker, and writer who had met Picasso in the south of France, painted the sails of the Uruguayan navy training vessel, and created what was in 1960 considered the world's longest mural in Washington D.C. - 160 meters (525 feet), for the Organization of American States.
He traveled to Senegal, Nigeria, Tahiti, and Peru in pursuit of new artistic forms, and brought back objects from all of these places and embedded them in Casapueblo's walls. The building is, in a very literal sense, a life's work.
In October 1972, his son Carlos Miguel was a passenger on the Uruguayan Air Force flight that crashed in the Andes. For 70 days, as the world's most grueling survival story played out in the mountains, his father searched obsessively for the missing plane. Carlos Miguel was among the 16 survivors. There is a tribute to him inside Casapueblo - a quiet acknowledgment, in a building full of exuberance, of the moment everything almost ended differently.
Páez Vilaró died at Casapueblo on February 24, 2014, and was given a state funeral. Today the complex is owned by a business group that includes Antonio de la Rúa, son of the former Argentine president Fernando de la Rúa. The Ceremony of the Sun continues every evening, exactly as it did in his lifetime.
The Rooms
There are 72 units in total, and no two are alike. The range runs from double rooms to one-bedroom apartments to four-room apartments sleeping up to eight people.
The interiors follow the Mediterranean aesthetic of the building - whitewashed walls, curved forms, terracotta and ceramic details - with flourishes inspired by Páez Vilaró's art. Kitchenettes and full kitchens are available in the larger units.
The four-room apartments can accommodate up to eight people and have a full kitchen, living and dining area, and multiple bedrooms. Honeymoon rooms come with a minibar and are angled to make the most of the sunset view.
What you are paying for is the experience of sleeping inside a work of art. The building's corridors wind and double back on themselves, the terraces look out over one of the more unusual architectural silhouettes in the world, and at some point in the evening, Páez Vilaró's voice will come through the speakers and say goodbye to the sun.
All 72 rooms face the Atlantic and come with a terrace or balcony; the view is the whole point.
The Spa
The Gym and Health Club sits directly above the hotel's private beach. The indoor centerpiece is a heated pool with a hydrojet system - designed for both swimming and hydrotherapy.
A sauna and a fully equipped gym occupy the same space. Treatment rooms offer facials, body massage, aromatherapy, Ayurvedic massage, lymphatic drainage, and thermogenesis treatments using alternating hot and cold gels; advance booking is required for all of these.
For those who prefer simpler pleasures, there are two outdoor pools in the main complex, surrounded by sun loungers on the solarium terraces.
The backdrop - the white curves of the building, the ocean below, the cliffs of Punta Ballena - makes them among the more photogenic pools in South America.
Ruta Panorámica s/n, Punta Ballena, 20003 Punta del Este, Uruguay
