The skyline of Punta del Este, Uruguay, will sport new buildings if the current plans of several corporate groups from the turf and overseas finally allowed these entrepreneurs to cut a deal for as many as $150 million. One of the projects embraces the construction of a 35-story building, the tallest high-rise in the famous tourist circuit, for $40 million.

The Americas Soccer Cup that came to a close Saturday in Peru brought in as many as 20,000 foreign tourists who shelled out $25 million in the country, Arturo Woodman, president of the Cup´s Organizing Committee, said this week. Ticket sales amounted to $4.7 million in just 17 days as 430,000 soccer fans watched the games in seven Peruvian cities.

A grand total of 583,937 foreign tourists arrived in Costa Rican airports during the first half of the year, up 28 percent from the first six months of 2003. Would this increment continue at a such a white-heat pace, tourism authorities in the country are expecting to put up numbers in the double digits by the end of the ongoing year and rake in some $1.4 billion worth of revenues, nearly $200 million more than in 2003.

International tourism panned out to be Brazil’s third-largest source of income money during the first half of the ongoing year with $1.6 billion worth of revenues, up 46.3 percent from 2003. The Central Bank reported that the local travel industry only trailed behind soybeans and iron ore as the South American nation’s biggest source of hard-currency money.

Potentially low hotel fares in both Cancun and the Mayan Riviera are bugging travel industry authorities who are concerned about a possible bad case of overblown demand. The local Tourism Department informed that despite the area has plenty of building space for more hotels –barely 30 percent of the total surface is being used right now- opening more resorts there takes an array of additional actions to prevent travel gridlocks.

Some 350 Venezuelan and Argentinean entrepreneurs huddled last week in Polamar (Margarita Island) to cut a number of business deals in several fields, including tourism. Venezuela’s Foreign Office informed the business round –held within the framework of the Venezuela & Argentina: Integration Partners forum- was opened by President Hugo Chavez on behalf of the host country and closed two days later by his Argentine counterpart Nestor Kirchner.