[1][2] He took an active role in the search for survivors of the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes, as his son Carlos Páez Rodríguez was a passenger.

[4] He was one of the "Grupo de los 8", a movement of Uruguayan artists formed in 1958 together with Oscar García Reino, Miguel Ángel Pareja, Raúl Pavlovsky, Lincoln Presno, Américo Sposito, Alfredo Testoni and Julio Verdie in order to promote new tendencies in painting.

The experimental tendencies of the Grupo de los 8 have since gained a place of unquestionable relevance not only in the panorama of Uruguayan art but also at an international level, some of their works forming part of museums and collections worldwide.

[5] He purchased a sea-front property on eastern Uruguay's scenic, then-desolate Punta Ballena in 1958, building a small, wooden lodge that over time became "Casapueblo" ("House-Village").

[7] The sprawling compound, a whitewashed cement citadel reminiscent of Mykonos, was built in stages by the artist to resemble the mud nests created by the region's native hornero birds, and became his home, atelier and museum.

He remained close with numerous friends from his days in Paris in the late 1950s, particularly Brigitte Bardot and Pablo Picasso, and in 1967, established a film production company ("Dahlia") with the help of European industrialists Gerard Leclery and Gunther Sachs.

He created 12 murals in Argentina, 16 in Brazil, 4 in Chad, 3 in Chile, 4 in Gabon, 11 in the United States, and 30 in his native Uruguay, as well as a scattering of works elsewhere in Africa and in the Polynesian islands.

[16] Carlos Páez Rodríguez portrays Vilaro reading the official list of names of survivors during a radio broadcast in the 2023 film about the crash, Society of the Snow.