Punta del Este's glamour is barely a century old, but the peninsula sits inside a much older frontier: Spanish gun batteries on Isla Gorriti, the 1771 dragoon barracks at Maldonado, an 1860 working lighthouse, and Azorean San Carlos, founded in 1763.
Launches from Punta del Este port cross to Isla Gorriti in 15 minutes, landing near the ruins of the Batería de Santa Ana, a Spanish artillery post built from 1767 to guard the estuary against Portuguese fleets.
Begun in 1771 for the Spanish crown's Blandengues cavalry and completed in 1797, this is the largest surviving colonial military complex on Uruguay's coast; its thick stone arcades now hold exhibition halls and a courtyard.
Raised in 1801, the Torre del Vigía was the garrison's lookout, spotting sails entering Maldonado bay and signalling the batteries on Gorriti. A tight stone stair climbs to the parapet above the colonial street grid.
Started in 1801 and finally consecrated in 1895, the cathedral faces the plaza laid out when Maldonado was founded in 1755. Ombú trees, an iron bandstand and low 19th-century façades ring the town's original core.
Set in an early 1800s colonial house on Ituzaingó, the Mazzoni fills its rooms with Charrúa stone points, gaucho silver, shipwreck salvage from the bay, period furniture and photographs of Maldonado before the resort boom.
Lit in 1860 and still operating, the 45-metre lighthouse anchors the peninsula's oldest block. Its beam served the whaling and pilot station that existed here decades before the first resort villas were surveyed in 1907.
La Barra's maritime museum keeps Uruguay's largest private salvage collection: whaling harpoons, ships' logs, navigation instruments, shells and material recovered from the many wrecks around Isla de Lobos and the peninsula.
Engineer Leonel Viera's 1965 undulating bridge over the Arroyo Maldonado was the first catenary-deck bridge of its type anywhere, built cheaply after floods repeatedly destroyed the earlier crossings to La Barra.
Pedro de Cevallos founded San Carlos in 1763 and settled Azorean families here. The church on Plaza Artigas keeps colonial images and the surrounding street grid, workshops and adobe houses predate Punta del Este by 140 years.
This small municipal museum traces José Artigas's 1811-1820 revolution with maps, uniforms, weapons and a room on the Éxodo del Pueblo Oriental, when thousands of families abandoned their farms and followed him north.
The Ralli shows Latin American and European art in a Mediterranean villa among the pines — Dalí, Chillida and Uruguayan masters — and the surrounding 1950s Beverly Hills streets record how resort money reshaped the dunes.
The brick tower was built in 1946 as the water tower for the new Barrio Parque del Golf, then wrapped in a hotel. Its afternoon waffles-and-tea ritual is the longest-running custom of Punta del Este's first resort generation.