Al G - 1-20-2007 at 10:22 AM
January 19, 2007
Bulldozers Hit the Beach in Los Cabos
By ELISABETH MALKIN
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.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company