  The southern Pierre Auger Observatory is presently under construction in
Malargue, Mendoza, Argentina. It combines two complementary air shower
observation techniques; the detection of particles at ground and the
observation of associated fluorescence light generated in the atmosphere above
the ground. Experimentally, this is being realised by employing an array of
1600 water Cherenkov detectors, distributed over an area of 3000 km^2, and
operating 24 wide-angle Schmidt telescopes, positioned at four sites at the
border of the ground array. The Observatory will reach its full size in 2006.
However, with the 540 tanks and 12 telescopes presently in operation, the
Pierre Auger Observatory has become the largest world-wide cosmic ray
experiment already now. This paper sketches the experimental set-up and
discusses the current status. In parallel to the ongoing completion of the
experiment, a large number of events have been detected with energies above
10^19 eV. The data are used to verify both the performance of the individual
detector components as well as to test the quality of the hybrid event
reconstruction. All results obtained so far are very promising and they
underline the great advantages of the chosen hybrid approach.
