



Cabo Polonio, a remote beach village in southeastern Uruguay, sits on a green peninsula between the Atlantic and a desert landscape of shifting sand dunes. Strewn across the grassy promontory are a single lighthouse and a few hundred whimsical dwellings. Rasta-colored flags serve as wind vanes, tinted glass bottles are embedded in walls, and exteriors are painted with pictures of suns, cow spots, rainbows and a Klimt-like rendering of a woman. One stands out as particularly fanciful. It’s more sculpture than cabin, constructed from panes of glass, wood, plastic, bamboo blinds and green plexiglass, with tall, lush plants growing out of the floor.

On a recent visit to the village, I knocked on its door to find Omar Santiago, a scruffy Uruguayan in his late 20s, arranging to rent the house to a Chilean couple. “I’m not a hippie,” he said, pointing to his ringing phone. “Look here, a business call.” When his place is rented, Santiago later explained, he sleeps in a tent he keeps pitched on the beach. I asked him if he owned his plot, and a playful smile crept across his face. “Yes and no,” he said.

His reply evoked perfectly the peculiar standing of Cabo Polonio, a bohemian outpost just south of the Brazilian border where squatters have been building eclectic homes since the 1960s. Continuing disputes between the inhabitants, the Uruguayan government and a handful of private land owners have kept much of the land’s legal status in limbo. The situation became further muddled when, in 2009, a colony of sea lions earned parts of the hamlet National Park status. While the various lawsuits are being resolved — or, rather, not resolved — the town has become a destination for travelers who, on the trail of a rumor, come seeking an edge-of-the-earth, off-the-grid experience.

No roads lead to Cabo Polonio. To get there, most visitors cross the sand dunes to the west by jeep, horse or on foot. Save for a handful of businesses with generators or wind power and houses with solar panels, the structures in town have no electricity or running water. The only power lines in sight illuminate the lighthouse. Most shacks have a well outside. Inside, tin buckets with holes in the bottom, which you hang up and pour water through, serve as showers. Cows graze on earth banks where the beach begins. Long blades of grass swirl in the wind, tracing their own form of hieroglyphics in the sand. Vendors pass from shack to shack, selling mussels, cakes and hot water to refill thermoses of yerba maté. A small pickup truck from a neighboring town distributes bags of ice once a day.

The first time I visited, in 2006, a Uruguayan woman was offering vials of crushed whale bones, which she billed as aphrodisiacs. I stayed on that year after my friends left, to revise my novel “Flower Children.” After a three-day rainstorm, I emerged from my cabin to find the sky a loopy pink, a whale washed up on the beach and penguins wandering around in the grass. “It’s because of an eclipse,” someone in town said. “The animals lose all sense of direction.”

Besides being a nature preserve, Cabo Polonio is also something of a cultural preserve, a place to find a bohemian ethos that is disappearing from the Uruguayan coast, where, 50 miles to the south, around José Ignacio, construction of high-end hotels is booming. Polonio’s spectrum of regulars spans artesanos who sleep on the beach and sell their wares in town — jewelry, wind chimes, miniature lighthouses made of seashells — to doctors, lawyers and the occasional celebrity. The French-Spanish pop star Manu Chao and the Academy Award-winning Uruguayan composer Jorge Drexler have been known to go occasionally, while the Argentine writer Alan Pauls, the songwriter Diego Frenkel and the actress Inés Estévez have been spending summers here for years. “The place reminds me of Kuta, Bali, in the ’70s,” Beth Hird, an artist from Berkeley, Calif., told me. “This was my era.”

Sebastián Soler, an attorney who was at Harvard Law School with President Obama and lives in the Palermo Hollywood district of Buenos Aires, has brought his family to Polonio every summer for the past 12 years. Its charm, he said, is that it remains unspoiled. “The day you’re walking on the beach and hear the sound of a TV coming through an open window, the place is gone.”

Though there are a few hostels in the village center, most visitors rent homes from locals like Santiago. The dwellings toward the hilly south side of town are slightly more upscale, with views of the sea and some with solar panels and off-road vehicles parked outside. On the north side, where Santiago lives, the land flattens and the dwellings grow more precarious and quirky.

The eccentricity and whimsy of the settlement draw a multitude of day visitors, who make the town a curiosity stop along their vacation route. This past January, roughly 1,500 visitors arrived in the village center per day, in overladen jeeps.

The influx of tourism only serves to complicate Polonio’s already fragile existence. In addition to the continuing land disputes, the Uruguayan government has twice razed scores of houses, once in 1996 and again in 2001, saying they interfered with the movement of the dunes and thus with the coastal ecosystem. In response to the first demolition, over 100 of the wealthier settlers joined together and purchased the disputed land on which their dwellings sit. But they are the exception. Most of the settlers own only their dwellings, and any party that wishes to remove a structure from the land must purchase it from its inhabitant, a step neither the government nor any of the private owners have taken. Recently the government put forth a new plan to demolish 150 of the more ramshackle dwellings, again on grounds that they meddle with the coastal ecosystem. Locals say the proposal is merely an economic calculation, that the government wants to develop the area to stimulate tourism.

The regulations of the National Park limit further construction, and building materials are not allowed in unless they are for repairs. If additions are made to existing houses, patrolling rangers force their removal. “The idea is to preserve it as it is, no more houses or businesses,” said Mary Ester Pereyra, whose husband, Freddy Calimares, is a fisherman and a member of one Polonio’s founding families. “We’ve come to think this is probably a good thing.”

Though there is cellphone service now — seven years ago, you could find it only on the top of the lighthouse or the peak of a nearby sand dune — Polonio remains largely unplugged. The only place to recharge your cellphone battery is in the main grocery store, Lujambio’s, and only when its generator is running. Dim in the daytime, Lujambio’s flares up at night, becoming a beacon for people fumbling through the dark in search of food, water, batteries, candles and beer. Last year, Lujambio’s started Polonio’s first “Internet cafe,” consisting of one laptop and a stool.

Not everyone wants to preserve the bare-bones lifestyle. Some people who live here year-round say that keeping things primitive is unnecessarily costly and complicated. A restaurant owner named Diego Grignola told me that when his truck broke down on the way to buy gas for his generator, he was in a jam. “Without gas, we have almost no battery left,” he explained. “Soon we’ll have no music, no blender for smoothies.” He pointed to a small windmill on the roof of his restaurant. “Everything depends on the wind.”

“Electricity is the most incendiary topic of all,” said Laura Cánepa, who owns Posada de los Corvinos, a hostel-cum-library where, to borrow a book, you must leave something that holds value where you live but not in Polonio, like your driver’s license or fingernail polish. “The fishermen and business owners want electricity, since it would be much cheaper to keep things cold. Others of us are strongly opposed.”

Boundaries between public and private are blurred everywhere in Polonio. Along with free-roaming animals, locals and visitors are constantly traipsing across each other’s lawns. During the summer tourist season, year-rounders set up makeshift restaurants in their homes.

One night this year, stumbling around in the dark in search of one such establishment, my partner and I barged in on what turned out in fact to be a family having dinner.

At night, life is lived by candlelight. If you venture outside, your chances of making it to your destination depend on the cycle of the moon and the power of your flashlight. When the moon is new and your flashlight dies, you must wait for the lighthouse to swing landward. With no televisions or radios, apart from a handful in the village center, and no cars to speak of, the loudest sounds are those of waves breaking on the sand or horses shuddering in the distance.