Uruguay’s Punta del Este Revels in Glitzy Image

Surface appearances are important to visitors to Punta del Este in Uruguay, South America’s equivalent of Miami or St Tropez. Many of an increasingly international crowd is drawn to the beach resort by the lavish and exclusive private parties thrown at the beginning of each year.

Deep-pocket visitors are important too in a town renowned as the most expensive in the region. If not invited, some visitors are prepared to pay small fortunes to be seen.

The dozens of private jets that touch down each day in high season –together with the luxury cars bought especially to parade along the beach front drags, or the well-polished yachts at anchor- are proof of the wealth that is drawn to this peninsula, where the placid River Plate meets the rough surf of the Atlantic Ocean.

Although visitors to Punta del Este are 14 percent fewer this year because of the blockades on bridges to Uruguay of Argentines protesting against the construction of a $1.2 billion pulp mill across the river, they are spending some 25 per cent more, according to Uruguay’s tourism ministry.

The high spending is not only evidence of Argentina’s recovery from its crushing financial crisis at the end of 2001, but of the prosperity and liquidity in the region in general, with increasing numbers of Brazilians and Chileans lured by the resort’s glitzy image.

Long favored by Argentina’s rich as a refuge from the oppressive summer heat of Buenos Aires, the beach resort is awash with actors, singers, politicians, tycoons and models. Social butterflies from all over the world flutter in.

Some 25 tower blocks are planned just outside central Punta del Este alone, while the wider area under construction is almost double what it was a year ago.