🇺🇾 Uruguay · Interior and Sierras
San Gregorio de Polanco is a picturesque town in the department of Tacuarembó, in northern Uruguay, set on the shores of the Río Negro reservoir (the Rincón del Bonete or Gabriel Terra dam). It's known for two features that make it unique: its freshwater beaches, which turned it into a much-loved river resort of the interior, and its status as an 'open-air museum', thanks to the numerous murals that decorate the town's walls.
The mural project turned San Gregorio into a singular case within Uruguayan tourism: visual artists intervened on the town's façades and walls with works of art, creating an open-air gallery you tour on foot that gave the place fame and an identity of its own. Added to its extensive sandy beaches on the reservoir, San Gregorio combines art, nature and rest in an unusual way.
This guide gathers everything practical for visiting San Gregorio de Polanco: the beaches and the Río Negro reservoir, the tour of the murals of the museum town, boating and fishing activities, where to stay and camp, and how to get there from Tacuarembó. A destination of the deep north, original and quiet, ideal for anyone looking for a different kind of resort and an unexpected cultural offering.
San Gregorio de Polanco grew as a town on the banks of the Río Negro and was transformed after the building of the Rincón del Bonete (Gabriel Terra) dam in the 1940s, which formed the great reservoir and gave rise to its beaches. At the end of the twentieth century, a public art project covered its walls with murals, turning it into an open-air 'museum town'. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The largest department in the country, in the gaucho north: land of the Cuchilla de Haedo and the Fiesta de la Patria Gaucha, of the disputed birthplace of Carlos Gardel at Valle Edén and of the beaches and murals of San Gregorio de Polanco.
Read the history of Tacuarembó Department →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Picture a country town, lost in the north of Uruguay, where almost nothing happened: low houses, a square, cattle, the river alongside. And suddenly, twice in less than a century, that town changed completely. First it was given a sea of fresh water; then it was turned into the largest open-air art gallery in the country. San Gregorio de Polanco is exactly that: a place that reinvented itself twice and that today resembles almost no other corner of Uruguay.
San Gregorio emerged as a town of the Uruguayan north, in the department of Tacuarembó, on the banks of the Río Negro, the country's main inland watercourse. Like so many towns of the interior, it grew tied to rural life and to the river, in a region of countryside, cattle ranching and river and overland links that connected the north of the territory. The town's life was always marked by its relationship with the water: the Río Negro was a route and a resource, and the shores a space of everyday life. That closeness to the river defined the identity of the place long before it became the tourist destination it is today.
The place name, San Gregorio de Polanco, combines a religious dedication with the name of the area, in the tradition of Uruguayan interior towns. For a long time it was a quiet place, little known outside its region, until two milestones —the mid-twentieth-century dam and, decades later, the murals— would give it national visibility and turn it into a unique case, able to offer the traveller sandy beaches, urban art and the calm of the deep north all in one place.
The great turning point in the history of San Gregorio was the building of the Rincón del Bonete dam, on the Río Negro. Work began in 1937 and the plant was inaugurated on 21 December 1945: it was the first great hydroelectric plant in South America and, for decades, Uruguay's main source of renewable energy, until the arrival of Salto Grande. For many years it was officially known as the Gabriel Terra hydroelectric plant —after the president of the time— until in 2019 Parliament passed a law (19.795) that gave it back its popular name: Rincón del Bonete.
That project, originally designed by the German engineer Adolf Ludin and conceived decades earlier by the Uruguayan Víctor Sudriers, formed an enormous reservoir: some 1,240 km² of surface, the country's largest artificial lake. The reservoir flooded vast stretches and altered the shorelines, but at the same time it gave rise to one of San Gregorio's greatest tourist assets: its freshwater beaches. The great body of water of the lake, calm and without strong waves, created extensive sandy beaches that in time turned the town into a river resort, a singular case in a country whose beach tourism is concentrated on the ocean coast.
So a project conceived to generate hydroelectric power ended up giving San Gregorio de Polanco a new vocation. The reservoir's beaches drew holidaymakers from the northern interior, who found in this corner of Tacuarembó an alternative of sun, sand and fresh water, far from the sea but with the charm of a resort of their own. Much of the town we see today —with its waterfront, its beach access points and its summer life— is explained by that lake born of the dam.
The great milestone in San Gregorio's recent history came on 10 April 1993, when the town became the first Open Museum of Visual Arts in Uruguay and in the Americas. The idea was as simple as it was bold: if the town had no money to build a museum, then the whole town would be the museum. Instead of hanging pictures in a room, the walls of the houses, the fences, the façades would be painted, and the work would stay out in the open, in plain sight of everyone, free, forever.
The initiative came from the Comisión de Amigos del Arte y la Cultura of San Gregorio, backed by the local council, the residents and, later, the Departmental Government of Tacuarembó, taking as a reference a similar experience developed in Spain. The commitment of the residents themselves was key: they gave over their walls for the artists to work on. Without that house-by-house permission, the museum wouldn't have existed.
A week before the opening, numerous visual artists were invited to the town and set down their art directly on the walls and streets of San Gregorio. Among the notable names of that founding stage are Gustavo Alamón, Cléver Lara, Tomás Blezio, Luis Scarpa and Luis Muro. By the day of the opening there were already more than 30 finished works, a number that would grow year after year. Since then, walking through San Gregorio means running into art at every step: a portrait on the wall of a shop, an abstract landscape on the side of a house, a scene in dialogue with the town and the river. The museum has no doors, no opening hours and no admission, and that's precisely its charm.
Over the years, the project took the name MAAIS (Museo a Cielo Abierto de Arte de Latinoamérica de San Gregorio de Polanco) and consolidated itself as a living museum: today it holds an average of 150 murals, a figure that shifts constantly because the works are exposed to the weather and are gradually renewed or repainted. Each summer new pieces are usually added, often made during gatherings and workshops with guest artists from Uruguay and abroad.
In 2023 the museum's 30 years were celebrated, with commemorative activities that brought together artists, residents and departmental and national authorities, reaffirming the role of the MAAIS as a pioneering forerunner of street art and muralism in the region. The project is today jointly run by the town hall of San Gregorio de Polanco, the Intendencia de Tacuarembó and cultural and tourism bodies.
So San Gregorio combined two complementary identities: that of a river resort, born of the 1940s dam, and that of a museum town, born of art in 1993. That singular fusion of nature and culture is what defines the town today and sets it apart on the Uruguayan tourist map, offering the traveller an experience as unexpected as it is memorable in the deep north of the country.