Casapueblo (Museo-Taller de Casapueblo)
Carlos Páez Vilaró's hand-built white cliffside studio near Punta del Este, now his museum and gallery.
The Uruguayan painter, sculptor and writer Carlos Páez Vilaró came to the headland of Punta Ballena, about thirteen kilometres west of Punta del Este, in 1958. He began with a metal shack, then a timber studio he called La Pionera, and over more than forty years extended it by hand into a cascade of whitewashed volumes, domes, stairs, passages and terraces stepping down the cliff towards the Río de la Plata. He worked without formal plans, shaping the building as a sculpture and citing the mud nests of the hornero bird and Mediterranean villages as models.
Casapueblo now holds the Museo-Taller, where paintings, ceramics, murals and objects from the artist's travels in Africa and Latin America are shown alongside his studio, together with a gallery, a café and a hotel in the upper levels. Páez Vilaró died in 2014 and the house is run by his foundation. Visitors gather on the terraces each evening for the Ceremonia al Sol, when a recording of the artist reading his poem to the sun is played as the sun sets over the water.
Highlights
- Whitewashed sculptural house built by hand over four decades
- Museo-Taller with the artist's paintings, ceramics and studio
- Terraces stepping down the cliff above the Río de la Plata
- Nightly Ceremonia al Sol with the artist's recorded poem
