The new Loreto hotel--Villa del Palmar

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April 6, 2013

In the afternoon, I drove to the new hotel—Villa del Palmar—that’s located a few miles south down the coast from Ligui.  When I first paddled here two years ago, it was still under construction.  The road to the hotel is about three km long, all gravel.  The first stretch isn’t very impressive, because it’s along the bed of a dry wash.  That suggests guests may be isolated for a few days, when a hurricane dumps rain on the mountains. 

Next, the road leaves the wash and goes through a gargantuan, monumental entrance gate, with a security guard in a white uniform.  Then you’re on a graded slash across the hillside, like a superhighway, but still no asphalt.  As you approach the hotel, it looks barely finished, sort of squeaky clean, final details still to come.  But there are some guests.  A few shuttle buses were arriving, though the hotel seems sparsely populated.  It could be the setting for the song Hotel California, though that song suggests something small and seedy, not this cavernous new construction.

At the front desk, I had to explain that I was looking around in case I wanted to stay here, and they gave me an identification bracelet.  Outdoors toward the sea, there was pool after pool.  One huge one (below), surrounded by smaller pools at different levels, some for children.

The plantings were new--just taking hold.  There were cactus gardens.  Everything was beautiful, but didn’t quite jell.  Too new, too generic, something missing (besides people).  Still, it’s amazing what some water, shade, and some vegetation and trees will do for the desert.  You fill like you might want to sit down, and not roast or get sunburned to a crisp.

The setting of the hotel is truly magnificent. Behind it is a small desert valley, surrounded on three sides by low mountains.  The hotel faces a magnificent bay, looking out towards Danzante Island, which looks like a fairyland castle.  There’s a narrow row of dunes between the beach and the hotel grounds—with a sign saying to keep off because the dunes are a natural area.  So, that makes you wonder—wasn’t the place where the hotel was built a natural area?  Without the hotel, this cove and the valley behind it would be an incredible wilderness area.  But you can’t feed Mexicans with wilderness, and so it was developed.

Facing the beach, I waled to the left-hand side of the grounds.  Here was a high plywood fence I couldn’t see  over.  So I went to it’s end, where the terraced grounds dropped with a wall to the dunes.  Standing at the edge, I looked beyond the plywood fence.  Beyond was a dry wash, with gravel  jumbled by bulldozers—a totally barren area in stark contrast to the green and ordered grounds of the hotel.

I went to the other side of the hotel grounds facing the beach, and found much the same.  Totally barren, though not as disturbed as the dry wash on the other side.  I’ve never seen such a stark contrast in nature in my life.  I took panorama photos on both side.  I may have discovered a new kind of panorama, where you contrast two things on either side of a boundary.  Later, I found that the hotel and nearby town subsist on desalinated seawater.

It was as if the whole hotel and grounds were some giant mothership from another planet, landed here in the desert.  A planet of intelligent amphibians evidently, because they brought so many pools of water with them.

Having seen how isolated from the environment the hotel was, I couldn’t help feel that the guests were captives there, as I walked back from the beach overlook towards the lobby.  I don’t think there was a single guest on the beach.  This incredible setting was little more than a painted backdrop.  These guests would never know the thrill of a luminescent sea.

Starting the drive to San Javier

In late afternoon, I headed towards Loreto, then turned away from the sea and towards the mountains, on the new Loreto-to-San-Javier highway.

The foothills were magnificent in their dusting of feathery golden grass, spurred no doubt by extra moisture from the hurricane last fall.   They were bounded on one side by the blue sea, and on the other by the jagged crest of the Sierra la Giganta.  The low light was clear and brilliant.  The foliage was a mix of chaparral, grass, cactus, and exotic trees.

I stopped wherever I could for photos, but most turnoffs were littered or barren slashes made by the highway construction equipment.  But eventually, as the highway started to go up in earnest, I found a lovely flat meadow of golden grass, where I could pull off to some distance from the highway on a dirt road.

I pitched my folding chair on a little knoll, overlooking the dry wash, next to a little shrine for the pilgrimage route.  It was a perfect spot for a beer as the dusk came on.  The wind was warm—now windy, now still—as the night came on.  Frogs were singing down in the wash.  There must be pools of water there.