In early 1982, Punta del Este hosted its first International Meeting of Modern Sculpture in the Open Air, and nine artists arrived to compete for space. Mario Irarrázabal, a Chilean, was the youngest of them. When a dispute broke out over the plots assigned in a public square, he made a contrarian choice and walked down to the sand instead. Given the entire summer to work, he finished in six days, fighting the strong southeast wind that funnels across the peninsula. The fingers are concrete and plastic over a skeleton of steel bars and metal mesh, the outer surface sealed against the salt and sun. Of all the works begun on the beach that summer, only Irarrázabal's stayed. It has never moved from its original place.

The sculpture is often read as whimsy, but Irarrázabal carved it as a message about the sea. The waters toward La Barra, up the coast, throw rough surf that suits board riders but punishes swimmers; the calmer side toward Solanas is the safer place to wade. So he shaped a hand the way a drowning person's hand might look in the instant before the water takes them, fingers spread, grasping at air. It is a memento mori disguised as a photo opportunity. Most visitors clambering between the fingers never sense the second meaning, and that double life, beloved landmark and quiet caution, is part of why the piece endures.

Worldwide acclaim followed quickly, carried on postcards and snapshots long before social media existed. Irarrázabal returned to the form again and again, casting near or exact relatives of the Punta del Este original in distant places. A version went up in Madrid in 1987. In 1992 came the most famous descendant of all, the Mano del Desierto, a lone hand thrusting from the emptiness of Chile's Atacama Desert, hundreds of kilometers from any coast. Venice received its own in 1995. The fingers on Brava Beach are the source from which all the others spring, the first time the artist tried this strange, arresting idea, and the one place where the hand still rises out of the sand it was made to warn about.

The world settled on La Mano, the Hand, but the sculpture answers to other names too. Locals often call it Los Dedos, the Fingers, for the most literal reason. Irarrázabal himself gave it a loftier title that reframes the whole thing: Hombre emergiendo a la vida, Man Emerging into Life. Read that way, the figure is not drowning but being born, climbing up out of the earth into the light. The two readings, death by water and the first breath of living, share the same five fingers, and the sculpture refuses to choose between them. That ambiguity has helped make it one of the most photographed landmarks in Uruguay. It has not aged untroubled. Standing exposed on a public beach, it endures sun, salt, and the steady nuisance of graffiti, and it has needed repeated cleaning and care to stay the bright icon the postcards promise.