Uruguayan utopia
Having only been on a horse a couple of times in my life, I never dreamt I’d be herding cattle in the Uruguayan wilderness
I love it when a hotel or restaurant or cafe or tour guide has a completely different take on things. Something innovative, unexpected or going against the grain is always refreshing.
Estancia Panagea in Uruguay is just like that, having an almost Basil Fawlty attitude to its guests that is consistently hilarious. The 2,400-acre estancia, or ranch, has 1,100 cattle, 1,800 sheep, 74 horses, two dogs and three pigs - and less of the latter whenever they run out of bacon.
Many estancias in South America are geared to tourists and inauthentically comfortable but this one is a working farm with hearty local home cooking, no wifi or landline phone, limited hot water, and electricity just for two or three hours daily via a generator.
It is located at Tacuarembo, in the northern interior of Uruguay. Inexplicably, Uruguay has been virtually ignored by tourists. True, its neighbours, Brazil and Argentina, have numerous incredible treasures, but Uruguay has many charms of its own.
To get to Estancia Panagea my party had taken a 150-minute £9 ride in a modern coach with wifi from Colonia to the capital, Montevideo, and then a five-hour coach costing £20 to Tacuarembo, passing many miles of beautiful grasslands populated by the occasional grazing horse, cows or sheep, with very few buildings to be seen. I can’t remember seeing such an expanse of never-ending countryside anywhere else in the world.
However, in city areas occasionally cars would go by with speakers mounted on their roofs, belting out commercials on repeat. It was so intrusive and invasive, and would demolish the tranquil scene.
We were collected from the bus station by estancia owner Juan in his slightly scruffy minibus. We got a taste of what was to come from his first remark.
“You want air conditioning? Open the window,” he said, as we bounced about in the rickety van.
At the estancia, Juan, who originally trained as a vet, greeted us with an hilarious talk about life on the ranch. It was clear that he and his Swiss German wife ran the place on their terms rather than the visitor’s. Most tourism businesses work to a system of how they can best serve their customers, Juan’s business model was ‘how can I do this completely on my terms?’.
“It’s not a tourist ranch, it’s a bloody Uruguayan working ranch,” he said. “When we started 20 years ago, with the food we offered we tried to please everyone. That lasted about two weeks. Now we just serve gaucho [cowboy] food and if you don’t like the food there’s always tomorrow. I know you’ll like the food tomorrow because you’ll be so hungry you’ll eat anything.”
In the event, the food was delicious, a beef stew and a vegetarian bean stew the first night, pork cooked in wine on a bonfire with salad and fried potatoes for lunch the next day.
“We have around 3000 films here for you to watch and for the last twenty years have collected 20 of the best films each year,” he said. “So we have 400 of the best films for you to watch. But chances are you’re just going to watch Friends, and when you get round to deciding, after all arguing what film to watch, it’ll be 9.30pm so don’t come complaining to me when the generator is switched off at 10.”
The next morning we were to ride some of the vast expanse of the surrounding countryside, herding up cattle and sheep. There were around 15 of us, and none of us had much - or in one or two cases any - horse riding experience at all.
We were taught how to saddle our horses, and with excitement tempered by some trepidation, I headed out across the Uruguayan outback on my horse, Dartagnian, across the gently hilly plains that in places resembled the Yorkshire Dales or Wales, but with the heat turned right up.
We approached a waterhole populated by around 100 cattle, the blue water glistening out of a green expanse. After all the initial warnings about unruly horses (Juan explained these were ‘real’ horses, not docile touristy horses) it soon became supremely relaxing, and I found I only had to nudge the reins slightly to veer left or right, or put on the brakes.
At one point one of the gauchos spotted eagles circling ahead, and then we found out why: there was a dead sheep’s carcass at our feet.
Juan then said to me: “You need to call out to the cows.”
“What do I say?” I asked, cluelessly.
“I don't know! Anything! They don't speak bloody English!” he shouted.
We surrounded the cattle and encouraged them to move to another area that our gaucho companions - dressed in their supremely cool garb of coloured checked shirts, scarves, baggy cotton trousers (bombachas) and broad-brimmed hats - wanted them to go.
In the two hours - you can also go on four-hour rides - we also herded sheep, and there were only a couple of mildly tense moments, which were quickly resolved: one, when several horses made a beeline for water in a stream on this hot summer’s day, and created a traffic jam where there’d be a huge jump to navigate if we didn’t manage to direct the horses away, and when one rider dropped her reins, which caught the horses’ feet, causing it to panic and start jumping around. She quickly jumped off.
It’s funny how you can so easily slip into a relaxed state in the right circumstances. In the UK I’m sometimes wary of walking in fields with cattle, because they have been known to kill people occasionally. I wouldn’t dream of walking near a bull. Yet here, by the end of the day, at times I was surrounded by cattle at close quarters, and a couple of times realised I was standing next to a bull.
If that experience wasn’t enough for one day, we also herded around 300 sheep into sheep dips and pens, separating them from the shorn and the unshorn, but not before worming them, administering tick removal and treating some for foot infections. It was a seemingly chaotic sea of sheep, with people trying to grab hold of unruly sheep while others squirted medicine in their mouths with a dispenser.
Sometimes travel really gets you out of your comfort zone, and you can do things you’d never dream you’d do. This was one of those occasions, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
Further information
Estancia Panagea (email: panagea@adinet.com.uy; phone: 598 99836149) costs US$60 per day, including three meals daily, accommodation and horseriding.
Intrepid Travel (intrepidtravel.com) offers a 10-day Best of Argentina, Brazil and Argentina tour that includes this experience, with prices starting from £1,695. This includes nine nights’ accommodation, some meals, transport and a tour leader throughout. Excludes flights.
Further reading
Uruguay (Bradt, £18.99)
What a great post and experience. I like getting out of my comfort zone and do something like this. Hope I get to travel there one day.