Baja California tourism poses mounting challenges for conservation, critics say

MEXICO CITY —No place attracts more foreign investment in tourism in Mexico than the state of Baja California Sur, where developers are trying to replicate the success of top resort destinations like Los Cabos and Cabo San Lucas. The state brought in a leading $783.3 million between January and September last year, with figures in the third quarter of 2024 accounting for more than half of Mexico’s total national tourism investment.

But the influx of development is also frustrating residents and worrying conservationists, who say that the projects often skirt environmental regulations, encroach on the traditional way of life of local communities and damage protected areas.

“There’s condo project after condo project after condo project,” said John Moreno Rutowski, an attorney who has fought development in Todos Santos, a town on the Pacific coast of the peninsula. “They’re just blatantly, nakedly illegal.”

Last year, environmental groups sounded the alarm on the “Kuni” megaproject, which would have involved developing 1,600 hectares (3,953 acres) for hotels inside of the Balandra Protected Natural Area, a strip of coast near the state capital of La Paz that features dunes, mangroves, reefs and scrubland.

Construction would have required more than 10,000 cubic meters of water and a massive desalination effort resulting in a brine discharge harmful to marine ecosystems, according to the Mexican Center for Environmental Law (CEMDA), which called for a public consultation between residents and the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat).

There are currently 28,000 hotel rooms across Baja California Sur, CEMDA estimated. The Kuni megaproject would have added another 20,000, or around 70% of the state’s total capacity. The increase in tourists would have created almost 30 tons of solid waste per day, the organization said.

By the end of 2024, developers for the project withdrew the environmental impact statement they had submitted to Semarnat for review, effectively killing the megaproject.

Today, there are several other hotels in development that pose similar threats across the peninsula. Two of the most controversial ones include hotels planned near Cabo Pulmo, a town on the Gulf of California where oceanographers have called the marine and coastal ecosystems a “hope spot” for the planet. Hotels for the projects would cover over 600 hectares (1,729 acres) across beaches and dunes, featuring golf courses, villas, beach clubs, a desalination plant and shopping centers, according to complaints.

The projects will affect 262 plant species and 30 bird species that are not considered in the environmental impact statement submitted to Semarnat, according to CEMDA.

Cabo Pulmo is traditionally a small-scale fishing village, numbering around 200 residents. But as large-scale fishing moved in and marine life disappeared from one of the region’s largest coral reefs, they decided to ask the government to establish a 7,111-hectare (17,572-acre) national park, with the idea of transitioning the local economy to eco-tourism.

For years, Cabo Pulmo National Park was considered a conservation success story, with residents learning how to run businesses for scuba diving, snorkeling and other eco-tourism activities. Fish populations have increased by more than 400% since the creation of the park in 1995, according to Greenpeace. Scientists have also recorded the return of the whale shark (Rhincodon typus).

But in exchange, residents now deal with an influx of visitors and new development projects that threaten ecosystems in other ways, leading some of them to question eco-tourism as a sustainable conservation model.

“If I had known that this was going to happen, that there would be so many people, so much tourism, I wouldn’t have gotten involved,” said Mario Castro, a former fisherman who now runs a boating service. “I wouldn’t have even supported asking for a protected natural area because we didn’t understand the consequences.”

In 2015, the community managed to stop a $2-billion tourist complex that included 15 hotels, two golf courses and a marina with nearly 500 slips on 3,814 hectares (9,425 acres) of land. Today, one of the new hotel projects overlaps with the same site.

Known as La Abundancia, the project allegedly encroaches on 500 meters of the national park, threatening wildlife habitats. The other hotel, called Baja Bay Club, would be located 1.5 kilometers (.93 miles) from the park — still dangerously close, critics said.

Developers for Baja Bay Club didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. Contacts for La Abundancia couldn’t be reached.

Local officials originally declared the hotels “environmentally feasible” before federal officials temporarily suspended the environmental impact permits last month. In a February statement, the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) said no construction would take place until the permits were reviewed.

“We’re really hurt by what’s happening,” Castro said. “You could say, ‘Okay, more tourism, more money,’ but it’s not about that. It’s about living peacefully, being happy, and thinking about future generations. It’s not just about wanting to work and have a lot of tourism and forgetting our roots and traditions.”

Around 80 kilometers (50 miles) west of Cabo Pulmo, on the other side of the peninsula, residents of the town of Todos Santos have spent years fighting off similar hotel projects. Starting in 2014, they staged marches and sit-ins protesting the multi-million-dollar Tres Santos project, which would have built three hotels, over 4,000 residential homes and a 400,000-liter water tank, as well as several commercial venues.

The project would have destroyed wetlands along the coast and interrupted the small-scale fishing economy, critics said.

Developers finally suspended the project in 2016, and last year a court said the original environmental impact study failed to meet the standards for construction.

But now there’s another major hotel project in development, with as many as 1,452 housing units and 500 hotel rooms planned for the next fifty years, reportedly covering 307 hectares (758 acres). Some of the area is scrub vegetation and sand dunes.

Activist and lawyer John Moreno Rutowski, who was born on the peninsula, spent 100 days in prison for protesting the Tres Santos project back in 2017. He said he’s going to fight the new hotel project but is equally worried about the countless smaller plots being bought up around the area, most of them covering less than 100 hectares (247 acres). Foreign investors hold onto them for future projects or start developing without permits, he said.

Small developments can be harder to fight because there are so many of them, which can be overwhelming, Moreno Rutowski said, whereas major hotel projects allow residents to rally around a single threat.

“You can feel the magnitude [of a larger project] whereas these other small projects don’t capture the public’s attention,” Moreno Rutowski said. “They affect the immediate surroundings and neighborhoods but don’t really go beyond the township, and it becomes a much more localized conflict.”

As development continues to flow into the area, residents could confront worsening problems with utility services like drinking water, trash collection, sewage management and electricity, he said.

To stop that from happening, Moreno Rutowski said he will continue to organize protests and file injunctions and other legal complaints when possible. But it could be a fight that lasts for many more years.

“When they do approve something that’s out of bounds, out of the scope of the legal framework, we have time to implement legal action and social maneuvers that will allow us to…neutralize it, slow it down, bring it back into the fold of legality,” he said.

Banner image: Cabo Pulmo. Photo courtesy of CEMDA. 

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