“Casa Gastón hotel…
I met Gastón Ugalde nearly twenty years ago, in London, at an art fair in Earl’s Court. I had been traveling to Bolivia for years by then, trying to build journeys worth taking, and finding almost nothing on the Salar de Uyuni that felt considered. It was cold, and rough, and beautiful in a way no one had yet made room for. Then I walked into the Pinta fair and stopped in front of a stand lovelier than anything else in the hall. It read Siart Bolivia, and in the corner, among the work, sat a man with a beard, wild hair and a wide hat. That was Gastón. We started talking and we didn’t really stop for the next two decades.
Gastón is sadly no longer with us. But his vision stands at the foot of the Tunupa volcano, on the northern rim of the Salar, ten suites facing the largest salt flat on earth. Casa Gastón is the first luxury hotel-museum in Bolivia, his final work, carried through by his son Mariano and the family.
I came to see it in its first days open, and one afternoon Mariano and I sat and talked, about his father, about the salt desert that never let him go, and about what it takes to turn anartist’s life into a place you can stay.
A lifelong love of the salt
Bolivia was Gastón’s great subject. “If we had to pinpoint one thing about his life and his work,” Mariano told me, “it was his love for Bolivia.” You feel it across a body of work so varied it can look like ten different artists: painting, photography, sculpture, installation, land art, all of it held together by that one thread. And at the center of it was the Salar.
He first came in the late 1960s, when almost no one did. “He slept on the floor. There was nothing then, no hotels, no hostels,” Mariano said. Uyuni was a busy train stop, yet travelers rarely stepped off to see the white plain beyond it. Gastón did. He photographed it first in black and white, and when he saw how color behaved against all that brightness he understood he had found a photographer’s paradise. He came back again and again. He liked to say there was no moment when the Salar was ever the same twice, and he meant it exactly, driving out on a Monday, home on Tuesday, back again on Wednesday for a single frame.
Slowly he turned a blank space on the map into a destination, bringing friends first, then the wider world. In 2019, Vanity Fair gave him its Changing Your Mind in Travel award for the way one person, with a vision that had nothing to do with tourism, can remake how a place is seen. That is exactly what he did with the Salar de Uyuni.
There was no moment when the Salar was ever the same twice.
One artist, every medium
He began as a photographer, and, Mariano told me, studied with Ansel Adams in the 1960s. But photography was not yet appreciated as a fine art form then, and he could not make a living from it, so he taught himself to paint. He painted for twenty years out of necessity, but he never stopped circling back to the camera, to video, to whatever caught him next. He called himself restless to a fault, unable to stay with one thing, moving from a canvas one day to a film the next to a piece of land art the day after. He loved installation above almost everything. He collected Andean textiles for fifty years and worked them into his art, he made collage, and he counted himself a master printmaker and engraver. There is little he left untouched.
An indomitable spirit
In the welcome note that waits in every room, Mariano describes his father as an indomitable spirit. Ask him what he means and the answer is about the man before the work. “He had a love for life that was infectious,” he said, “generous, kindhearted.” Years on, strangers still tell the family how Gastón had helped or taught or changed them in ways they never knew about. He was irreverent and did everything his own way, and nothing was ever too big for him. The lesson he left his children and grandchildren was plain: think big, never settle, stay positive, and remember that everything is possible.
When I think of him, I think of something he said to me more than once, that this is the real gift of art, that it connects you to people who share your sensibility. “It is not about money, it is not about a transaction,” he would say. “It is about what moves you in life.” It was true of the two of us, meeting across a booth in London. It is true of the house his family has made.
Think big, never settle, stay positive. Everything is possible.
Built with its community
Gastón was close to the small community at Jirira, at the foot of the volcano. It was a village of around thirty people. It is nearer a hundred now, because most of them work at the hotel, and the family hopes it grows further as the young come home. For years people left to find work across the border in Chile, in mining towns like Calama, always meaning to return to a place that offered them little. Now there is a reason to stay. Mariano looks to the Fogo Island Inn in Canada, where a single hotel carries a whole community, as the model. Four years into building here, he speaks of his neighbors as real partners, and of doing this consciously, hand in hand. “They understand the vision,” he said, “and they support it fully.” There is ambition in it too. Gastón spent his life showing Bolivia proudly on the world’s stages, in London among the great names, and Mariano wants Casa Gastón to carry that further, to make his father the larger-than-life figure he was and to draw travelers from everywhere to this one far corner of the altiplano. For a small country, he says, that is no small thing.
Casa Gastón opened in 2026 at Jirira, on the northern edge of the Salar de Uyuni, its ten suites reached by air into Uyuni and then out across the salt. The flat changes with the seasons, a vast mirror when the rains come between December and April, a floor of white hexagons through the dry months from May, and both are worth the journey. We build a stay here into tailor-made journeys through Peru and Bolivia, most naturally alongside Lima, Cusco and Machu Picchu, as in our fourteen-day Extraordinary Peru and Bolivia. It is, I think, the finest way to stand on the Salar, inside the house one remarkable man spent a lifetime imagining.
By Marisol Mosquera, founder of Aracari