The 2009 season in coastal Uruguay

Laguna Garzon, photo courtesy of Sibel the Tourist

Every conversation I have with people who are not directly involved in tourism or real-estate in the coastal region of Uruguay starts with a "So, was the season terribly bad?" or a variation thereof. It's become a bit tiresome to explain that no, for many businesses it was in fact the best ever in recorded history. Imagine the incredulous expression in people's faces, but anyone who stopped to look around can easily have noticed.

Ironically, many people appeared to want to see confirmation of their dark expectations. After spending 45 minutes traversing Punta del Este from one side of the peninsula to the other in mid January, normally a 5 minute drive, I would arrive at a dinner party to hear some fool declare "Punta del Este is empty! Very few cars this year..." It was hard to contain the chuckle.

In reality, the beach parking lots were packed solid even in previously considered "solitary" beaches, and the traffic jams driving into Punta del Este in the peak weeks started several miles before than in previous seasons. One particularly crazy night, while trying to reach the Peninsula, I ended up in El Jaguel, akin to saying you're going from Midtown to Wall Street on the West side and you end up in Queens, as traffic cops diverted the flow ever farther away from Punta del Este.

According to official figures, the numbers of tourist arrivals into Uruguay were flat from the year before (which was an excellent season) but the difference this year came from the heavy presence of prosperous Uruguayans (I'm laughing as I write this: prosperous Uruguayans, a modifier one can use about once in a generation), who came out en masse every weekend, in addition to those vacationing for longer terms. In the last week of January for my friends and relatives it was virtually impossible to find a house or a room anywhere between Solis and Jose Ignacio, and the same apparently happened in La Paloma, La Pedrera and further east.

"Ahhh, but the season now is sooo short, it lasts just a couple of weeks..." quip the undeterred naysayers. Well, you see, not really. Rather, it's quite the opposite. The month of December is now full blown high season, and February is a lot busier than it used to be (witness La Barra and points east, which use to board up in late January, and have continued to thrive through the end of February). Then in March we get all the adults with no school-age children, many "foreigners," as we call those who are not from Argentina or Brazil, but rather from Europe and the U.S. So the season is quite longer now, despite the fact that families from the region take shorter 2-week or one month holidays, rather than settling in for the entire summer as they did in the 70s.

"So this must have been a 'budget' vacation, in linewith the global melt-down, right?" Well, not really. From our immediate sources we know that it was a record season for anyone rightly positioned, but official figures are pretty eloquent: expenditure grew 40% in dollar terms over 2007. And no dollar devaluation this season to blame for the increase.

"OK, that may be, but surely many real-estate developments must have collapsed and sales must have frozen, causing a free-fall in the prices of houses, condos and land" is the next comment in this by now cliched conversation. Surprise surprise, wrong again! Sales not only continued apace throughout the summer (a time when transactions don't usually take place) but prices actually rose. We continue to see people looking to buy, some even looking for multiple purchases. The developers who did not raise their prices left them unchanged. And guess what, although there is one project that has been crashing ever since its launch 2 years ago (it appears to have more lives than a cat) over the last 3 months we have seen many projects break ground, and proceed with astounding speed.

So, no, not a terrible season in all. Now let's hope we can continue to refute naysayers this time around next year.