The promise of Uruguayan gold drew careful eyes. From late December 1879 into March 1880, the French mining engineer Henry Küss traveled to evaluate the concession on the Arroyo Corrales, surveying the mineralogy with the rigor of a man who had seen mining ventures fail before. The company hoped to raise at least eight million francs to develop the workings. Küss's report was a study in restraint: he allowed only that it might be worth spending two or three hundred thousand francs on a more systematic study. It was hardly the verdict the investors wanted. Yet the gold fever proved stronger than caution, and the immigrants kept coming - Italians, Portuguese, and Spaniards who settled the surrounding camps and bent their labor to the hills.

The Represa de Cuñapirú is the town's true monument. Built to generate power for the gold operation, it is remembered as South America's first hydroelectric dam, sending current to the localities of San Gregorio and Corrales and driving the aerial cableways that hauled ore and stone to the processing plant. For a remote corner of Uruguay to have electric power in the 1880s was extraordinary - a frontier mining camp lit while far larger cities still burned gas and oil. The dam ran until 1918. Today its ruins stand as a national historic monument, weathered stone beside the water, a reminder that ambition once flickered here in the form of light.

Mining towns live and die by the price of metal, and Minas de Corrales has done both. A railway line opened in 1902 to serve the workings and ran until 1916, when the French company's era drew to a close. On 9 November 1920 the settlement was formally recognized as a pueblo by law. The hills fell quiet for decades after, the great machinery rusting in place, until in 1997 a new operator, Uruguay Mineral Exploration, brought modern methods back to the old gold ground. By the 2011 census the town counted 3,788 residents - a community shaped, century after century, by what lies beneath its soil.

Step away from the mine workings and the country opens into something serene. About fifteen kilometers west of town lies the scenic area known as Rincón de Tres Cerros - the corner of three hills - best seen from along the banks of the Tacuarembó River, where the land rises in distinct summits above the water. The hills can be approached by a road branching south off Route 29, about fifteen kilometers past the town. It is a landscape of pasture and stone and slow water, the kind of place where the drama of the gold rush feels far away, replaced by the older, steadier drama of geology itself.