History

IXTAPA/ZIHUATANEJO: TALES OF TWO CITIES

By Bob Schulman

By now the beaches here were supposed to be packed with hotels. Or so the developers predicted when Ixtapa opened nearly 30 years ago on an old coconut plantation 150 miles north of Acapulco. By the year 2000, their studies said, Ixtapa's hotels would be offering a whopping 17,000 rooms for what was expected to be a tidal wave of close to 2 million vacationers a year.

As things turned out, Ixtapa has been steered to a much more modest growth track. Somewhere along the way a decision was made to ease up on the project - much to the delight of the community and its visitors alike.

So there's still a lot of wide open spaces between the 13 major hotels scattered along the resort's two-mile-long Palmar Beach. Including a few other properties in the vicinity, Ixtapa's inventory today totals around 4,000 rooms.

"We want to grow very, very slowly," explains Ana Camarena, spokeswoman for the convention and visitors bureau of Ixtapa and the nearby village of Zihuatanejo. By growing at a snail's pace, officials note, the resort can just sort of snuggle into the area's environmentally sensitive master plan. Ixtapa's developers say they're more interested in quality than quantity. Most of the hotels around Palmar Beach, they point out, boast Mexico's prestigious Five Star rating. One, the 423-room Las Brisas Ixtapa, scores a notch above that with the country's posh Gran Turismo rating. Rounding out Ixtapa's attractions is an upscale shopping center, two 18-hole designer golf courses and a 450-acre marina, a haven for luxury yachts cruising the Mexican Riviera from Mazatlan down to Acapulco.

'Zihua' comes of age

The "slow it down" decision at Ixtapa was particularly welcome a few miles away at Zihuatanejo, which -- before Ixtapa - usually was described in guidebooks as "a sleepy little fishing village." Zihua, as the locals call it, is now many times larger, having experienced something of a commercial boom as a by-product of its neighbor's increasing popularity down the road.

Remarkably, despite its growth, Zihua still retains much of its small village charm. Its shops, markets, handicraft stands and alfresco cafes dot a tiled area of four or so blocks running inland from the town's half-mile-long main beach, the Playa Principal. The beach looks out on another local jewel: Zihua's ten-mile, horseshoe-shaped bay. You'll see its shoreline stretching from both sides of the city, overlooked by cozy hotels, bungalows, vintage villas and newer condo developments.

It's about a 15-minute ride by water taxi from Zihua's municipal pier to the secluded swimming and snorkeling areas (and wall-to-wall restaurants) on Las Gatas beach at the southern tip of the bay. Along the way you'll skirt two other popular beaches, one of which, La Ropa, is the home of a "Special Category" hotel (Mexico's supreme rating) called Villa del Sol. Its 70 adobe-style rooms and suites, the latter with private pools, hug the beachfront or edge tropical lagoons. Helmut Leins, the hotel's owner, describes the ambiance of the award-winning property as "barefoot sophistication."

Other than the nearby La Casa Que Canta, another Special Category hideaway, most of the other two dozen properties in Zihua and around the bay are more modest two-, three- and four-star properties. All told they offer some 1,100 mostly "breeze conditioned" rooms to visitors on tighter budgets.

What's in a name?

The name Ixtapa is said to mean "white place," after a nearby stretch of salt-bleached beach. Zihuatanejo is the Spanish version of the area's original name, Cihuatlan, to which the conquistadores added "ejo," meaning "of little importance."

Little did they know. In pre-Columbian times, historians say, this was the location of a great temple devoted to the spirits of women who died in childbirth and who returned to earth as goddesses on Mothers Day. Cihuatlan means "place of the holy women."

The temple - believed to have been on La Madera Beach just outside the city -- was on lands governed by the Cuitlatec tribe. Fittingly, the Cuitlatec had one of the country's rare matriarchal societies.
Women "cacicas" (chiefs) ruled the roost around these parts for hundreds of years until about 1400, when the Cuitlatec lands were invaded by fierce Tarascan warriors. Spanish troops conquered the Tarascans in 1522.

Fast-forward four centuries. In the 1930s, a number of foreign celebrities began "discovering" Zihua and its picturesque bay. Typically staying in hillside haciendas, they included movie stars, business titans, world-famous models and even an ex-king. Another visitor was Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan books -- among which were stories of a supposedly ficticious tribe of Amazon women.
Old-timers around Zihua will tell you that Burroughs got the idea for his Amazons right here, from tales of the Cuitlatec matriarchy.

Ixtapa: A Computer Found It

In 1969 the Mexican government decided to go all out to boost tourism. It started by creating a high-level agency tasked to build superresorts - from scratch. It was named the Fondo Nacional de Fomento al Turismo (the National Fund to Promote Tourism), or Fonatur for short.

The agency was staffed by experts in fields ranging from marketing to land management, backed up by economists, archaeologists, sociologists, entomologists and a few programmers for those then-newfangled computers. As things turned out, Fonatur's computer whizzes came up with some of the tourism world's best investments.

After sizing up possible resort locations all over Mexico from data collected during an earlier two-year study, the computer cranked out its first two selections: Ixtapa, and an uninhabited, 14-mile-long island running along the Caribbean shoreline on the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula.

First up for development in 1972 was the computer's find on the Yucatan. It was called Cancun. Ixtapa ran a close second on the development time-line, having been designed and built about a half-year behind Cancun.

Cancun opened for business in late 1974. Ixtapa's first hotel, the Aristos, opened in 1975.

Bob Schulman was vice president-public relations for Frontier Airlines until his retirement three years ago. Now a freelance writer specializing in Mexican destinations, he is a member of the Mexico Writers Alliance and the Society of American Travel Writers. Schulman, who lives in Denver, Colo., has been visiting Ixtapa/Zihuatanejo periodically since 1975.

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