La Paloma: Oh, the next beach town over

The night before we left Punta del Diablo, I was talking to the Californian marijuana entrepreneur. He asked where we were headed and I told him we would check out La Paloma. His response: “Oh, the next beach town over.” That pretty much sums it up: a forgotten alcove only remembered during the short summer months.

My alternate title to this post was “The Ghosts of La Paloma,” because this place was practically deserted when we passed through. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any ghost stories to tell so I couldn’t really tie it all together. We saw no other tourists, no vacationers and a lot of closed places. That may sound like a good thing, and to some extent it was, but for a town that seems almost entirely based on tourism, it felt a little weird. There were rows of holiday homes, hostels and hotels all completely empty except for a few Uruguayan weekenders here and there. Lonely dogs ruled the streets and followed us everywhere, them and bored small town teenagers. (The teenagers didn’t follow us though. That would have made for a much scarier stay.) The poor girl doing all the manual labour at our hotel seemed like she hated her life.

So. La Paloma. It’s a relaxing place; I’ll give it that. We spent three days or so, beach lounging and wandering through the empty neighborhoods. The water was surprisingly warm so I spent a lot of time jumping around in the waves like a little kid.

(Notice, I still have no tan.)

We ambled along the beaches and took pictures.

That white pole in the distance represents the closest thing to a ghost story I could scrounge from this place. Apparently, in the mid 19th century there were no lighthouses in this area but there were an increasing number of ships full of immigrants heading for the promise of Uruguay. In 1868, a ship, the Lise Amelie, loaded with Scots hit some rocks on the coast and everyone on board drowned. The tragedy spurred local authorities into action and they built a lighthouse with “six elegant and spacious rooms, one specially designed for castaways.” Expecting castaways, they obviously didn’t have much confidence in their lighthouse. That doubt turned into cracks and those cracks turned into another tragedy as the lighthouse came crashing down before it was fully built.

But, ever resilient, the locals persisted and rebuilt it, and in 1878 the newspaper El Siglo published:

Survivor of several generations, many more will continue seeing this sentry post, always here. Has anyone seen the death of a lighthouse?

Indeed!

In the end I suppose it was good that we saw La Paloma in the off-season because rumor has it that this place is going to explode. Investors are buying up large tracts of land all around town, hoping it will pay off in the near future, when La Paloma turns into the next big beach resort. One day the lighthouse could be simultaneously dwarfed by enormous hotels and blown up for package holiday posters. And I’ll be able to tell my kids, “Oh, La Paloma? Yeah, your mother and I were there back in 2010, before it was famous. It was so small then. We felt invisible, two ghosts in a forgotten town; no one saw us and we saw no one. Just like the lost souls of Lise Amelie, you could sink into the sand and no one would know you had ever been.”