Chamangá: A Rock Paintings Area

Chamanga was a true challenge to find. We went there by car from Montevideo travelling for two hours, first on a paved road and then 30 minutes on an unpaved road crossing rural farms typical of Uruguay. The scenery and wild animals we saw on our way were certainly interesting on their own right. Unfortunately, the paintings were less so. The pictographs are scattered within a large zone of private farms. You need the permission of each landowner to enter the site and then there are neither signs nor roads leading to the paintings. This has recently changed with public tours being offered for the first time.

What we eventually saw thanks to the kind help of two local children was rather underwhelming. There were about 45 pictographs scattered over a zone of 120 km2 as the Unesco nomination process took form but as the landowners didn't want their huge farms confiscated many of them have been blown off!! Almost all of the pictographs are degraded, covered with a red alga that makes them difficult to spot.