Playa Punta Diamante

Hello to everybody!
After 2 years of working at my chacra in Las Canas near Fray Bentos in Uruguay, I decided to make this blog to give an idea what has been done.
Working in Uruguay is a pleasure. The weather is sometimes very warm, even hot, sometimes very wet, but rarely very cold and often rain is quick followed by sunshine or dry wetter. Working with machines is a little bit more complicated. You have to be very careful what you buy. There is no consumer organization and suppliers can sell what they want. Most machines that we had bought did have serious problems and had to be repaired. In Uruguay that means: waiting (so not working with it).
People in Uruguay are mostly nice, kind and they always look happy. In the little towns there is no violence and although the income of most people is very low, everybody is nicely dressed when they leave their houses go to to the rambla where you can see lots of people driving slowly on their motorcycle (often three or more on one motor) or sitting and chatting with friends. Until late in the night!

Now the history of my chacra:
A chacra is a piece of land bigger than 5 and smaller than 50ha and I have 26 ha and my brother 5 ha so together 31 ha.
My first chacra had 12 ha with a house. I bought it from a famous south American actor at the start of 2006.

My brother bought the neighboring chacra from 5 ha south side of it and a year later I bought the neighboring-chacra of 14ha on the north side, so now we have a nice big chacra of 31ha with a beautiful beach in the middle.
In the beginning, the land was full of bushes up to 4 meters high and there was also a part, where lots of little trees grew with quite hard wood, called Chirca (Dodonaea viscosa) in Uruguay and this wood is really very hard.
With my neighbor Marc I bought a tractor with a 'rotativa', (rotovator) a very good cutter for grass and bushes up to 4 to 6 cms thick, but these Chircas...no way: they all need to be cut by a chainsaw, so slowly but surely all the chacras are now, two years later, quite clean from all weeds and there are now lots of nice grass fields there, where earlier walking was difficult.


Both of these pictures are taken on nearly the same spot, the left picture was taken 1,5 years earlier.

I am also very happy with the great number of very nice, big trees on the chacra.
So we have a big Aurocaria aurocana, monkeytree, a very big Enterrolobium contortisiliqum, named there Timbo or Oreja negro (black ear, because the seeds looks like ears) and also a very nice Ficus luschnathiana, from the well known Ficus-family, there known by the name of Higueron. This Higueron has a very nice vault trunk.
The trees will have a very important place on our chacra.

left is the big
Oreja negra,
at the right side is the vault trunk of the Ficus, from the same family of the figs.






More special trees on the chacra are two palms from the Butia family, we have some nice Ceibo's (Erythrina cristagalli), the national tree from Uruguay, very nice with their red flowers during the summer, in the garden from my house is a big Palo boracho (drunk wood), see here on the right under, in summer full with flowers,
which attracts lots and lots of hummingbirds. Also at the entrance of the chacra is a
little forest with more then 1000 Eucalyptus most of which have a height of 15m. These Eucalyptus will give me a lot of nice timber wood. In Uruguay these trees grown easily a meter a year and they have nice long trunks.

So one of my occupations this summer 07/08 was the construction of a little cabin made from these Eucalyptus. The location of this cabin was near the beach with a view over the Rio. Its measures 4x4m with a terrace in front of 4x2m overhanging the beach and a straw roof over the whole construction. The roof is now fixed on the poles and the cabin awaits my return to fix walls and floors. In the next part I have a reportage over how one makes a straw roof in Uruguay. When the walls and floors are there, the cabin will have multiple utilization, it will have a bed for a romantic night near the water, but I also can store my windsurf equipment there. I already dream of future sunsets on the terrace after a long windsurf run.

All over the world you can find straw-roofs; in Holland it is a symbol of luxury now, to have a house with a straw roof. At the beginning of the 20th century it was more common on farms. My former house in the Ardeche at the Plateau Ardechois had an ancient roof made from brooms, in Africa there are lots of them, I have seen them in Madagascar and Brazil and we also have them in Uruguay.
The dinner-table on my terrace was full in the sun, with shadow by a tree, but not shadow enough for eating in the afternoon, so I asked a local 'quinsador' to come and make a straw roof over it, so I took these pictures at all stages of the construction of this roof.
Straw arrives
in little bushes the construction over my table

straw is placed
against a side plank




with a long iron needle steel wire is fixed


this wire pulls around a bigger wire and this fixes
this range of straw. Now a next layer of straw can be placed, a bit higher, covering the bigger wire



A smaller side plank is placed higher to cover the first layer, then wire is placed again. Then with a special board, straw is equally displaced, that the same thickness is obtained. Then again the smaller sideboard is placed a bit higher, another layer is placed, and again

a new layer of straw is placed, fixed again with the thin and thicker wires, equalized again and so on slowly going up to the top. Arriving on top, straw hanging over, is strongly fixed around the top, where
later
it can be covered by cement or other material, to improve water resistance









On the right: one side of the roof is finished, now the other side is waiting:
first a scaffolding has to be placed, then the new side plank for the lower straw section and then, everything is as the other side, but first is the overhanging straw to cut on a pan lat,
then the side plank should be repeated.
The roof finished















With buying these chacras, my brother Ton and I have it in mind to build nice houses to sell them. When I bought my house, I could live in it inmedeadly, although I made some improvements, Ton's house was in such bad condition, that the only thing to do was to eradicate it totally. So on that place he gave an order to build a nice and pleasant house in local style with a straw roof, only 30 meters from the beach.

Here under the last pictures of my ´cabana´ near the beach, now finished and I´ve already had lots of nice drinks with fabulous sunsets. Now, the ´cabana´ serve
for storing my windsurf-equipment 
and our chairs etc.
later my plan with the cabana is to
have a little place for a bar on the beach,
a meeting-point for the futur owners of
the parcels of my ´country´.
I´m now waiting for the permission to start with my project: the `PLAYA PUNTA DIAMANTE´ country.
50 parcels from 1600m2 till 2500m2 all with a nice few over the Rio Uruguay on a gardened country-side with services.

will be continued