Coastal Utopias —
a ride along the shore

Picture yourself in an aristocratic family of 1930s Montevideo. Sea bathing has become a modern, healthful practice, but the beaches you can reach by tram no longer confer any distinction. Carrasco, by contrast, offers distance and exclusivity.

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Getting there is deliberately hard: you come by the high roads, following the Camino Carrasco along the ridge, skirting the long coastal sand flats. The journey is part of the ritual. Once there, the winding layout of the balneario — this seaside resort district, conceived in 1912 as part of a landscape plan by the French landscape architect Charles Thays — lined with avenues of maritime pines, leads you down toward the beaches and the sea.

Carrasco is not only rest: it is display. Dressing for the evening, walking the streets, taking a drink at the casino. The landscape works as a carefully built social stage. From here the itinerary dissolves into the continuity of the rambla, the waterfront road and walk that runs the length of the shore, carrying you on toward the next singularity.

The way of seeing changes as you roll into the Parque Roosevelt. This is no longer distinguished leisure, nor landscape as social stage. From the viewpoint of engineers and agronomists like Carlos Racine, the problem is above all material: vast wetlands, shifting sand, and unstable soils that ruled out any kind of settlement.

The project became possible through the donation to the State, in 1907, of the lands belonging to the family of don Doroteo García. This gift of 1,300 hectares was conditioned on draining 100 hectares of bañado — marshland — to reduce public-health risks, and on afforesting 300 hectares for a public park.

Within that framework, in 1916 the State created what was then the Parque Nacional de Carrasco — Uruguay's first state park — and charged Racine with designing and carrying out large-scale afforestation. The technical answer was clear and radical: plant a great deal, plant densely, plant fast. Within a few years some 700,000 trees went in, mostly eucalyptus, maritime pines, and acacias, chosen for quick growth and hardiness.

The high planting density was not an ornamental choice but a logic of territorial infrastructure, true to a forestry policy the State pushed at the start of the twentieth century. The utopia here is not escape or fantasy but progress: to master nature and make it useful, productive, shared.

Leaving the unbroken shade of the Parque Roosevelt, the landscape opens and shifts register. The experience stops being immersive and arranges itself into bands, always over a sandy substrate that governs the ground. The bike rolls past a line of young pindó palms, still low and even. To one side, a drainage ditch keeps pace with the route and turns into a green corridor where giant reed, lantana, castor bean, hopbush, acacia, and morning glory appear.

Toward the coastal edge the vegetation grows lower and patchier. The psammophilous belt arrives — the plants adapted to sand, wind, and salt — acting as a transition between worked soil and beach. Along this edge, here and there, stand clusters of maritime pines bent by the steady work of the wind, marking direct exposure to the sea and recalling how unstable the ground still is.

On the opposite side, the road and its shifting façades — adapted summer houses, new construction — announce the definitive entry into the Ciudad de la Costa. This stretch is defined not by any single point but by the riding itself. The singularity is in the slow movement, in watching the urban eclecticism of the façades. The old summer house — light, built of flagstone, made for the season — adapts step by step to other uses. A school set up inside a holiday house reads as a clear sign: people no longer come here only to spend the summer; they live here all year.

The car shortens distances and changes the bond with the coast. Arriving stops being an exceptional outing and becomes routine. In that passage — sand flat, balneario, suburb — you can see how the wish to escape the city ends, inevitably, by producing another city.

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Entering El Pinar lets you read, almost as a territorial memory, what the Costa de Oro was when it was still a balneario. It is not a fixed point but a stretch you ride through. The gravel streets force you to slow. The bike falls into that rhythm and tunes the scale back to the body. As you draw away from the shoreline the sensory experience deepens: a near-unbroken planting of maritime pines, set between both lanes of the street, makes a permanent corridor of shade.

Here the pinewood is felt not as exceptional scenery but as a learned, familiar setting, built from the lingering smell of resin and the loose needles underfoot.

This planted wood sits, as everywhere on the coast, on a sand flat that did not vanish but was tamed. Under the needles the fixed sand persists, a reminder that today's landscape is the result of a long operation on unstable ground. The maritime pines, brought in to fix the dunes and make the soil livable, ended up woven into the everyday imagination of the summer and of coastal life — more present to the senses than many native species.

Here the landscape keeps a tolerant structure, where what was planted lives alongside spontaneous regrowth and daily use. The singularity lies in the slow movement, in the continuity of the shade, in the kept gardens glimpsed sideways over low fences, never breaking the reading of the wood. There is no closed form, no rigid design: the sand flat persists beneath the planting and resurfaces at the edges, recalling how unstable the ground is.

El Pinar appears, then, as one of the last stretches of the itinerary where the body still organizes the experience of the territory — before the logic of infrastructure takes over.

The landscape breaks off abruptly at the overpass crossing the Ruta Interbalnearia — the fast coastal highway that strings the resort towns together. The infrastructure organizes large-scale flows on a mainly vehicular logic. Vegetation is reduced to margins and embankments, a residual accompaniment to the road. Though the path lifts above the cars, the body stops being the measure of the space. On foot or by bike, the crossing stays indirect, long, and alien. The territory is connected, but not continued.

This point expresses a wider transformation of the coastal corridor. The Interbalnearia stopped working as a fast route and became, through the density of the resorts, a metropolitan avenue. The infrastructure, though, answers that change late. The result is a road that combines the traits of a street and a road without resolving either — what contemporary urbanism calls a stroad.

In this logic, the priority is to keep the car flowing. The scale is set to be read at speed, and pedestrian and cyclist are pushed off onto technical fixes that build no urban continuity. The raised crossing works as a barrier: it severs fabrics, lengthens everyday journeys, and turns the act of crossing into an exception within daily life. The neighbour who lived "across the way" ends up living kilometres away — because the crossing is dangerous, or because it demands an exhausting detour.

To reach the next singularity you have to cross a bridge with no footway or bike lane, narrow and uncomfortable, set just before the toll. The body is left exposed, pressed between fast lanes, railings, and noise. The interchange appears, then, as a fracture inside the itinerary. The landscape is still there on both sides, but it stops articulating the route. The infrastructure redefines how you can be in the territory — just before, leaving this system behind, the landscape opens again.

At Neptunia the landscape is no longer organized by the fixing of sand or by infrastructure, but by the dynamics of the estuarine edge. Along the coastal strip, native dune grasses such as pasto dibujante mix with introduced species like lion's ear to form a low, irregular, shifting border.

The nearness of the Arroyo Pando shapes this system. Along its banks a riverside woodland persists — curupí, red sarandí, ceibo, and arazá, species adapted to the alternation of fresh and salt water, to the tides and the seasons. The vegetation shields the banks from erosion and orders a territory of transition, where the limits are not fixed and the landscape recomposes itself continually.

Unlike the earlier stretches, Neptunia imposes itself neither as image nor as infrastructure. While fast traffic keeps to the Interbalnearia, this landscape is left aside, out of the way, reachable only by whoever slows down and leaves the main road. That marginal condition deepens its fragility — but also its worth.

Neptunia embodies, then, a more recent utopia: to conserve nature by accepting its instability. The landscape is neither fixed nor fully ordered; it is managed as a wild garden, where human intervention seeks to accompany open processes rather than dominate them. In that closing contrast — between the speed of the infrastructure and the slowness of the ecosystem — the itinerary finds its end: to live alongside nature is, always, to live with change.