More To Mexico...

REVIEWS

Azucar - Veracruz
Boca Chica - Acapulco
Habita MTY - Monterrey
Las Brisas - Acapulco
Rosas Y Xocolat - Merida
Rosewood Mayakoba - Riviera Maya

There is so much more to Mexico than Cancun, yet few travellers stray beyond this once pristine stretch of Caribbean coastline. Until now that is. Travelling both to and through Mexico is becoming easier, and throughout the country hotel developers and investors are gearing up to greet a new generation of visitors, boosted by a major influx of cash from the government of Felipe Calderon.

A major new government-funded infrastructure plan, launched in July 2007, will see US$50 billion every year for the next five years invested in the country’s ports, airports, roads and railways making travelling between different tourist destinations more accessible. Behind this investment is the national government’s desire to capitalise on Mexico’s tourism potential. Currently the third most important economic activity in the country, representing 7.7% of GDP, Mexico expects to achieve a 35% increase in the number of international tourists, to almost 29 million, by 2012.

In recent years major government planned developments like Cancun and Los Cabos have been key to Mexico’s tourism revenue, but now this focus is shifting to the States of Baha California and Sinaloa, close to the US border. In Baha California Ken Shuttleworth’s Make architects are masterplanning a multiple resort development which will equal anything on the Caribbean coast. Highlighted by the government as the most important tourism development in the last 25 years, the Siniloa project plans to create 44,200 rooms, of which 16,850 will be in hotels and the rest, condos and villas aimed at retirees from North America.

In the midst of one of the biggest glitches in the history of the free market economy, the irony is that Mexican tourism owes much to Fidel Castro. Before the 1958 Cuban Revolution, Havana, with its racy nightlight, sexy cabaret shows and pulsing Creole spirit, was where the world’s jet-setters went to party. A tourist infrastructure was established and Castro himself celebrated the dawn of his first New Year as President in Havana’s Hilton, managed at the time by a character called Brandstetter (‘Brandy’), a former US colonel. The Havana Hilton – then Latin America’s tallest and largest, with casino, supper club, pool and rooftop bar – subsequently became Castro’s headquarters (he closed the casino but, after worker’s protests, was forced to open it again a month).

When relations between the United States and Cuba plummeted shortly after, and all American hotels on the island were nationalised, Hilton brought Brandy to the newest up-and-coming resort town in the Americas – Acapulco – to manage Las Brisas. And Acapulco reigned supreme as the playground of the rich and famous throughout the next three decades. However by the 1990s, Cancun was causing a serious dent in Acapulco’s income as political events and interests caused funds to flow towards the south-eastern peninsula of Yucatan and away from the south-western erstwhile ‘Pearl of the Pacific’. Now Cancun has the highest concentration of five star hotels in the country.

But Acapulco is poised for a comeback. Leading Mexican boutique hotel developer Habita Hotels has set its sights on the original Riviera and where Habita leads, others will inevitably follow. Not only is the talented trio due to complete a thorough renovation and updating of a 1950s classic, Boca Chica, but it is also building an architecturally striking five-star property high on one end of the horseshoe that is a Acapulco Bay, destined to become a contemporary design classic and a potent symbol of Acapulco’s twenty-first century revival. Not to be outdone, the original classic Las Brisas has spent $20 million on a facelift which restores this icon of hospitality to pristine condition.

The relentless development of the Caribbean coast has reached a crisis point in Tulum, just south of Cancun. After Hurricane Wilma in 2005, the Mexican Government took stock and in 2007 introduced legislation to limit development that adversely affects Mexico’s coastal wetlands and mangroves. Such is its determination to take environmental issues seriously that in October 2008 the federal Environmental protection Secretariat threatened to demolish more than a dozen hotels it claims were built illegally in Tulum. The controversy continues and new hotels, such as the Rosewood Mayakoba, are keen to emphasise their environmental credentials.