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 Puerto Vallarta Real Estate | January 2007 
Bulldozers Hit the Beach in Los Cabos
 Elisabeth Malkin - NYTimes
| Near San José del Cabo, Mexico, a piece of beach is one of hundreds scheduled for development.
(Adriana Zehbrauskas/NYTimes) |
Is Los Cabos the next Cancún?
Take one look at the earthmovers clearing land for Puerto Los Cabos, this resort area's most controversial development, and you might be inclined to say yes.
Set against a nature reserve, Puerto Los Cabos promises a new marina, golf courses, high-end homes, hotels, shops and a faux Mexican village.
And that $850 million project is not the only one carving out a new landscape.
A land rush and building boom are reshaping Los Cabos, the upscale resort community at the tip of Baja California in Mexico, with about a dozen big projects and many more smaller ones either in the works or in the planning stages.
A once quiet seafront is now lined with the hulking shells of new hotels. Developers cut illegal roads through the desert brush and flatten dunes. Workers' slums straggle up the mountainsides.
Some worry that the breakneck pace will kill the town's allure, which goes back to the 1950s when stars like John Wayne and Bing Crosby came here to fish. Almost 1,000 miles from the California border, Los Cabos promised privacy and the rugged beauty of mountains, desert and ocean.
It hadn't changed much when Garth Murphy, a writer, arrived 30 years ago to stay at a funky little hotel called the Palmilla, where there were no locks on the doors.
“The plane buzzed the hotel, bounced up a dirt runway a couple of miles away and left us sitting on our suitcases in the middle of the desert hoping somebody would come to pick us up,” he said.
He bought a house as the Palmilla resort was being developed. It took four years for him to get water and electricity. But then the airport opened in 1984, and suddenly Los Angeles was just a two-and-a-half-hour flight away.
“The desert was stripped to dirt,” Mr. Murphy said. “Our house got buried in subdivisions, a golf course and tropical landscape. Now we're surrounded by billionaires.”
Since then, luxury resorts like Esperanza and Las Ventanas al Paraíso have been built to pamper the wealthy. The Palmilla is now the remodeled One & Only Palmilla, where John Travolta celebrated his 50th birthday. At Las Ventanas, guests cool off with Evian spray. Cappella Hotels and Resorts plans its own luxury resort in 2007. And in the last few years, the market for second homes and retirement retreats for Americans has burgeoned. Oceanfront villas now go for as much as $8 million.
Where the rich go, ordinary folks follow. Last year, the airport handled more than 2.7 million passengers, according to the airport's operators. Cabo San Lucas, at the western end of Los Cabos, has an alcohol-soaked reputation for spring breakers. What worries many is that nothing will stop the building until all of Los Cabos, made up of the twin towns of Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo, and the 20 seafront miles between them, is lined with hotels, houses and condos. Already, the development is spreading along the coast of the Sea of Cortez and north up the Pacific Coast toward the offbeat town of Todos Santos, an hour's drive away.
“What's tremendously bothersome to me is that all Mexico really accomplishes from this is to redirect people from one destination to another,” said Sven Lindblad, whose New York company operates nature cruises through the Sea of Cortez. “In all likelihood they will turn this absolutely magnificent place into another Cancún.”
Environmental groups say land speculation creates demand that is hard to resist. “The state government is accepting development everywhere,” said Pablo Uribe, a lawyer with the Center for Environmental Law in La Paz, the state capital.
But state officials say they are trying to find a balance. “There's a tug of war between the government as it tries to establish order and keep the growth at certain levels and the developers who say, ‘No, we want more,' ” said Marco Ehrenberg, the director of international relations for the state government of Baja California Sur.
The building and tourist boom is also drawing migrant workers from all over Mexico. The population is growing more than 15 percent a year as 60 people a day move to Los Cabos, which now has a population of some 200,000 people, local officials say. Many of the workers are living in slums of plywood and tar-paper shacks. The town's sewage works are overwhelmed, and there is increasing strain on the water supply. Septic tanks pollute the town's water table and overflow into the sea when it rains.
Even the sports fishing that first gave Los Cabos its fame is under siege from illegal commercial boats.
Prize marlins are half the size they were five years ago, said Enrique Fernández del Castillo, a local businessman who developed the main marina in Cabo San Lucas. A government proposal to allow long-line shark fishing 20 miles from the coast could deplete the stocks of sports fish.
Where will it stop? Critics of a proposed urban development plan prepared for the municipal government of Los Cabos say it will turn the area into a vast urban sprawl. The plan's scenarios suggest that the population could reach 1 million or 1.2 million in 20 years.
“This plan would completely change the concept of Los Cabos that we have been managing for years,” said Alfonso Cota, the president of a local architects' association.
Some people have had enough.
Don Sibley, a Dallas graphic designer, bought a house east of San José del Cabo in 1991, “a good distance away from what we thought was the tourist nastiness,” he said.
Now a California developer is scraping away vegetation on the 18 acres next door to put in luxury homes. “Our dream has pretty much turned into a nightmare because of the surroundings,” Mr. Sibley said. He and his wife, he said, are thinking of selling their house.
“It has just become a mini-Cancún, and who wants that?” he said. Others plan to fight it out. About 20 miles east, a Canadian conservationist named Dawn Pier is leading a group of Mexican and expatriate residents to pressure authorities to enforce the law. The developers “believe that federal development/construction laws and regulations do not apply to them,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “Sadly, they seem to be right.” The group managed to get Mexico's federal environmental enforcement agency to halt a project after the contractor cut a road through the desert, although she doubts the delay will last for long.
OF all the developments, it is the Puerto Los Cabos megaproject that has become the flashpoint in the battle over growth. Planned for 2,000 acres next to the freshwater estuary of the San José River, the development, with its 500-slip marina, has created an uproar. In early December, Greenpeace protesters chained up some of the construction equipment.
Conservationists and activists argue that the development poses too many risks to the estuary, home to as many as 200 bird species. The complex geography of the coastline allows the estuary to act as a sponge to absorb flooding in heavy rains while it also keeps out salt water.
Alterations caused by the marina and its jetties could affect that balance, conservationists say. They warn that salt water could seep into the estuary or that prolonged rains will cause more flooding.
But Jorge Buch, the project's director, said studies showed that the marina's seawater would not leak into the groundwater nor into the estuary. The houses and hotels will have their own desalination and sewage treatment plants, he said. He also responded to environmentalists' concerns that the development would drive off endangered leatherback turtles, which lay their eggs on the beach, by pointing to a plan to collect sea turtle eggs and raise the hatchlings until they are ready to be released.
Juan Carlos Barrera, the regional director for Pronatura, a conservation group, said that engineering could minimize hurricane damage. Pronatura is setting up an estuary preservation trust fund with $200,000 that the developers paid for zoning rights.
“Nobody has ever done anything for the estuary,” said Mr. Barrera. He concedes that development cannot be stopped altogether; his focus is on curbing the environmental damage it causes. He points to a few positive signs. Developers have finally agreed to sit down with the government and community groups to map out a coastal land use plan for the whole Sea of Cortez region.
In the end, he said, there is simply a natural limit to growth in Baja California: the scarcity of fresh water.
And there are moments when it is still possible to capture the old Baja. Mr. Murphy, the writer, fled what he calls the “boom-town mentality” of Los Cabos and now spends most of his time in his house in Todos Santos. At 62, he surfs almost every day. “This morning there was nobody on the beach in either direction,” he said. “I swam out and saw two whales.” |
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