The region of the toe in the cosmic-ray spectrum, located at about 45 EeV by the Pierre Auger Collaboration, is of primary interest in the search for the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). The suppression of the flux with increasing energy can be explained by the interaction of UHECRs with intergalactic photons, resulting in a shrinking of the observable universe, and/or by cut-offs in acceleration potential at the astrophysical sources, yielding a high-rigidity sample of single (or few) UHECR species around the toe. The predominance of foreground sources combined with reduced deflections could thus offer a path towards localizing ultra-high energy accelerators, through the study of UHECR arrival directions.
In this contribution, we present the results of blind and astrophysically-motivated searches for anisotropies with data collected above 32 EeV during the first phase of the Pierre Auger Observatory, i.e. prior to the AugerPrime upgrade, for an exposure of over 120,000 km$^2$ yr sr. We have conducted model-independent searches for overdensities at small and intermediate angular scales, correlation studies with several astrophysical structures, and cross-correlation analyses with catalogs of candidate extragalactic sources. These analyses provide the most important evidence to date for anisotropy in UHECR arrival directions around the toe as measured from a single observatory.