How Pueblo Garzón went from ghost town to Uruguay’s cultural hotspot

The Garzón train station lies in a partly abandoned Uruguayan village, about 90 miles east of the capital Montevideo, where a few dawdlers still carve out a rural existence amid the rolling plains of wayward cows and rambling armadillos. The terminal has a crumbling glory to it, dilapidated and yet defiantly charming.

Out back, rusty tracks run off into an empty horizon, long ago buried beneath pom-poms of tawny overgrown grasses. Trains haven’t stopped here for half a century. Yet there are two abandoned carriages on an empty plot nearby. Late last year, a third-generation art dealer named Iván Martinez gutted and linked them together via a wooden boardwalk. Inside, you now find installations from emerging Latin American artists.

The train carriages at La Galerilla seem to embody the cyclical nature of Pueblo Garzón. Once a land of unbridled opportunity, it languished for decades in obscurity until, only recently, it was born anew.

Garzón first became a place about a century ago, when farmers and ranchers flooded eastward from Montevideo towards Brazil. Some congregated in these undulating hills, about a dozen miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean, and they erected a small pueblo (town). Politicians in the capital didn’t get around to naming the place until 1935. In the end, they went with a homage to the famed 19th-century independence fighter Eugenio Garzón. The decorated general was destined to become one of Uruguay’s first presidents, but died on his way to Montevideo to take office. As Pueblo Garzón failed to live up to its own potential, the name seemed remarkably prescient.

Its death, like that of so many train towns, came at the hands of a new highway, Ruta 9, which carved a path a few miles to the south and made the railway line obsolete. By the 1960s, the population had plummeted from around 2,000 to less than 200. For half a century Pueblo Garzón lingered like some cinematic ghost town.

Then, over the past decade, something strange happened: Garzón’s abandoned homes opened up as high-end restaurants, wine bars and art galleries. Jet-setters from around the world began flooding in, enchanted by its unpaved streets and time-warp nostalgia.

“I fell in love with the town because I thought it had incredible bones,” explains Argentine chef Francis Mallmann, who is often credited with kick-starting Garzón’s revival. “You have these wide streets, this beautiful plaza and some nice simple architecture.”

The celebrity chef — best known abroad for his whimsical Patagonia episode in Netflix’s US series Chef’s Table — says he’s been enamoured with the place ever since his first visits in the late 1970s, when he ran a restaurant on the nearby coast. In 2003, Mallmann decamped from the muggy Atlantic for the drier interior of Garzón, opening a restaurant on the edge of its palm-lined plaza (and raising eyebrows among sceptical peers).

“We had quite a big impact as soon as we opened,” Mallmann says of Restaurante Garzón as we dine on strip roast, which has been grilled over an open fire, giving it a crispy bite and tender finish. “A lot of foreigners began buying land, so the mayor of Maldonado Department [where Garzón is located] saw that something was going to happen here.” Soon, streets were being spruced up, and the town saw some of its first improvements in a generation.

Right around the time that Mallmann galloped into town, so too did the wealthy Argentine businessman Alejandro Bulgheroni, who surveyed the granitic soils of the surrounding hills and saw visions of Tuscany. In the mid-2000s, he turned Garzón into a new 524-acre wine region.

“It was a big risk, as there was no wine being produced in this terroir,” Bulgheroni told me when I ran into him a few years ago on a visit to his lavish facilities at Bodega Garzón. “But when the first bottles came out in 2010, and they were good, we began constructing the winery.” It opened in 2016 and now some 30,000 tourists flock to Garzón each year to taste bottles that have changed perceptions of Uruguayan wine.

These bottles include Balasto, an elegant Tannat-heavy red blend, as well as the bright and energetic Petit Clos Albariño, which showcases the potential of this Galician grape on the far side of the Atlantic. Bulgheroni also has a passion for Provence-style rosés, notably in the 2021 Field Blend.

Beyond tastings, visitors to Bodega Garzón can also hobnob with power players from neighbouring Argentina and Brazil at the private clubhouse, play rounds at the Tajamares golf club or dine on more Mallmann-conceived cuisine at the on-site restaurant (the two joined forces in 2014).

Just as appealing as Bodega Garzón, however, are the more boutique wineries popping up in town, including Compañia Uruguaya de Vinos de Mar, which opened a small restaurant and wine bar this January. Run by Michelini i Mufatto (a family enterprise with wineries in Mendoza, Argentina, and Bierzo, Spain), it offers Uruguayan tapas paired with what it calls “transcendent wines”.

Sitting in the shade alongside a row of concrete fermentation tanks, I devour chef Juan Pablo Clérici’s bite-sized creations, including shrimp empanadas with llajua (a Bolivian chilli sauce) and croquettes with Gruyère and chorizo, tossing back silky Pinot Noirs and saline albariños grown within reach of the ocean breeze. The wines have both a quiet charm and surprising finesse — kind of like the town itself.

With so much buzz around Garzón now, it’s fast graduating from day-trip destination to somewhere for a longer trip. Mallmann’s small five-room hotel, located in a large brick building that once housed a general store, used to be the only game in town. Now, you’ll find rustic chic vacation homes and luxurious boutique properties such as the six-suite LUZ Culinary Wine Lodge, which opened last November.

I find the latter, a minimalist Moroccan-style property, amid emerald-green vineyards and olive groves on the road between Garzón and José Ignacio (the tony resort town 30 minutes south). Pairing a warm peach exterior with cool slate-grey rooms, it provides a welcome respite from the sapping sun. There’s also a spa with bespoke beauty products, a gin bar by the infinity pool and a pop-up restaurant in the adjacent pine forest, where Argentine chef Martín Milesi assembles guests around one long table.

Food and wine may be Garzón’s lodestone, but what has really solidified its ascendance in recent years — and drawn me back time and again — is the flood of artists who now call this village home. “When I first got here [in 2009] it felt like a ghost town, but it also had these little pockets of cool,” recalls American photographer Heidi Lender, who says she fell for the ample space and golden daylight. “I felt like I’d found a secret place nobody else knew about.”

Lender bought land on the spot and, in 2017, opened the creative institute Campo, which offers residency programmes for artists and a canteen where visitors might meet them. The annual Campo Artfest, its marquee event, sees three dozen artists converge on Garzón to create site-specific interventions, turning it into a carnival of creativity. Last year, for example, Argentine conceptual artist Leandro Erlich introduced an absurdist stoplight over Avenida Garzón with both red and green signals eternally lit.

Artfest takes place in late December, just before Este Arte, a budding art fair in the nearby resort city of Punta del Este, and the José Ignacio International Film Festival, which has outdoor screenings at the Garzón train station. The result: a month-long festival season for the global aesthete. Yet the entire summer (from November to March) is really a hive of activity as young artists breathe new life into the town’s abandoned 1920s-era homes.

Near Campo, I visit half a dozen new exhibition spaces, the largest of which, Walden Naturae, is an ambitious project from Ricardo Ocampo, the tastemaker behind contemporary art space Waldengallery in Buenos Aires. It’s sequestered behind an imposing red-brick wall on the edge of town and, in season, stages new shows of contemporary Latin American art each month.

Just beyond the town limits I find the sculpture park of Uruguayan visual artist Pablo Atchugarry (whose son Piero opened a gallery near the Garzón’s main square in 2019). Atchugarry’s monolithic abstract art shares hill space with works by German sculptor Peter Schwickerath and American Land Art pioneer Alan Sonfist. Their pieces rise like quixotic playground toys as I stroll the trails of this 400-acre reserve, passing some of the 15,500 endemic trees and shrubs planted here over the past decade.

In January, at a larger sculpture garden closer to Punta del Este, Atchugarry’s foundation opened Uruguay’s first true contemporary art museum: MACA. The massive wavelike building from starchitect Carlos Ott pairs paintings by Uruguayan masters (Joaquín Torres-García, María Freire) with the likes of Frank Stella, Wifredo Lam and Louise Nevelson.

“One of the protagonists of both projects is nature,” Atchugarry says, when we meet at his studio near MACA, 45 minutes of pastoral bliss south-west of Garzón. “So, it’s not just the artworks, but the artworks in a natural context.”

Alongside the arrival of MACA, Lender launched a Ruta de Arte (art route), uniting a circuit of creative institutions between Punta del Este and Garzón. “The possibilities are endless in terms of positioning us as a world-class art and culture destination,” she says.

Lender does worry, however, that all this buzz may be happening too fast — particularly for a small town like Garzón, which is only just waking up from a long siesta. “This past year something has shifted, and [Garzón has] grown a lot — and quickly — so we’ll see what happens,” she says. Yet the American, who likens Garzón to the beloved arts oasis of Marfa, Texas, is optimistic for its future. There will still be cows and armadillos wandering past the crumbling train station, but now they might have to share the dusty streets with gallerists and oenophiles, too.

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