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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | December 2005 
Baja Project's First Marinas Expected to Open Next Year
 Sandra Dibble - Union-Tribune
| | 'Quaint villages' seen as key to tourism plan, however, environmental groups fear the nautical stops could prompt unregulated growth from private developers. |
President Vicente Fox's administration expects to launch its most ambitious tourism development project next year with the opening of 11 linked marinas on the Baja California peninsula and the Mexican mainland.
While government planners initially estimated the project would draw 50,000 boaters a year, they now say the figure will be closer to 10,000.
"We're not planning to create small Cancuns or Cabos. What we want is small, quaint villages," said John McCarthy, director general of Fonatur, the Mexican government's tourism development and finance agency, during a stop in San Diego County.
McCarthy was in Coronado yesterday as the keynote speaker of a three-day conference on resort development in Mexico that ends today. Planned for 150 people, the event has drawn nearly twice that number; some people had to be turned away.
The conference, organized by the Baker & McKenzie law firm and the resort real estate firm Contact Development Corp., takes place amid growing interest in the Baja California peninsula on the part of U.S. buyers and investors.
 Participants include builders, developers, bankers, golf course designers and landscape architects. Presentations have ranged from legal aspects of resort development to cross-cultural communication to finding financing.
McCarthy said that by May, Fonatur hopes to open the first 11 of 28 planned marinas in the region of the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez. By May, the Mexican government also expects to open an 80-mile "land bridge" across the peninsula from Santa Rosalillita to Bahia de Los Angeles so boats can be towed between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California.
Formally presented by Fox in 2001, the Escalera Nautica plan originally envisioned 50,000 boaters and 1 million visitors annually by 2014. However, the project has been delayed and scaled down considerably following environmental reviews and criticism from conservationists.
Modified and renamed the Proyecto Mar de Cort้s, the plan has been slowly moving forward since last year. Originally limited to the development of marinas, the plan now includes creation of tourism circuits in the region and the introduction of sewage and electricity and other improvements to small coastal communities in the project.
One of the stops is Bahia de los Angeles, a region especially prized by environmentalists. McCarthy said Fonatur has yet to purchase land there but has obtained approval from Mexico's environmental agency, Semarnat, to build a marina at a location north of town. Fonatur is asking Semarnat how large a marina can be placed there.
Fonatur is investing $140 million in the projects, McCarthy said, and state and municipal governments are supplementing the sum with their own contributions.
McCarthy said that although Fox leaves office next year, "we hope the next administration will take it on." The support of state and local governments will help strengthen the plan's chances of survival, he said. |
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