El Pinar, Canelones, Uruguay

A year ago—as for a long time—Parque del Plata faced over a kilometer of surf beach that was inaccessible to casual beachgoers. Then someone had an idea. Instead of shoveling away the dunes that completely blow over the Rambla (beach road) every year, and hauling them in dump trucks to make a beach further up the rio Solís Chico…

..make a new mouth for the river. And then…

…add another land bridge (now wider), and just like that, Parque del Plata has almost a kilometer of new ‘ocean’ beach.

Pretty darned clever. But stay tuned. The Solís Chico is always changing. As we get into winter, I suspect it’s not going to be happy with that right-angle turn for long. But perfect for summer!

BTW, I feel obliged to put ocean in quotation marks, because—despite there being no flow along the shore, and no opposing shore—the Urguayans insist this is a river, not the ocean.

A walk to the beach today, Atlántida.