Feeling at Home Among the Elite in Uruguay’s Punta del Este

January 7, 2007
Frugal Traveler
Feeling at Home Among the Elite in Uruguay’s Punta del Este
By MATT GROSS

PERCHED on a bar stool and sipping a $7 Negroni, I surveyed the casino of the Conrad Hotel in Punta del Este with keen but detached interest. The slot machines blinked and burbled like exotic birds, and at the blackjack and poker tables, neatly dressed men and women glanced at their cards with stony faces. A poster near the V.I.P. rooms advertised an Enrique Iglesias concert.

I could hear the money running merrily down the drain — counterclockwise, of course: this was the Southern Hemisphere.

To say that casinos make the Frugal Traveler antsy is a vast understatement. My weekend budget of just $500 was enough for a mere five rounds of V.I.P. baccarat. In Punta del Este, on the Atlantic in the southeast corner of Uruguay, however, the casino serves another purpose: sitting at the base of the town's milelong peninsula, it's the perfect rendezvous point. The choice is as much symbolic as practical, for Punta del Este is a place devoted to celebrating money.

Punta is known as the Hamptons of South America — a haven for elites from Argentina, Brazil, Chile and beyond. It's where they come to chill with the supermodels Naomi Campbell and Gisele Bündchen at Buddha Bar, and to stock up on luxury labels like Gucci and Valentino.

Punta has other charms. Its beaches form a blond, boulder-flecked halo around the city, and in the golden light of early November, the buildings — the glinting Miami-esque towers, the immaculate old stucco hotels, the modernist glass summer homes — appear almost computer-generated in their breathtaking flawlessness. Farther inland, the rolling hills are carpeted with neat stands of pine and green-golden pastures that are home to cattle as tasty as Argentina's (tastier, Uruguayans claim).

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