History

Once upon a time at La Madera
By Michel Janicot

Pirates? Indians? Fishermen? Or one of each? No one knows who is buried in what is perhaps Zihuatanejo’s oldest cemetery; all that remains are three wooden crosses half-hidden by weeds and enough questions to fuel all sorts of imaginings of long-ago Zihuatanejo.

Playa La Madera or wood beach, located on Zihuatanejo Bay between Playa Principal and Playa La Ropa, gets its name from the Spanish times when trees were processed here and the beach was used to load timber onto boats. Remnants of the old loading pier are still visible as a rocky out-cropping or jetty on La Madera beach. The area of La Madera comprises the neighborhood of half a dozen streets that extends back from the bay.

The easiest two ways to reach the three lone graves is by walking eastward from the archeological museum, over the pedestrian bridge that spans the canal, continuing along the cemented beach path to the four-story pink condominium building, turn left and the graves will be immediately behind the edifice; or walking westward from la Madera beach along the beach walk towards El Centro and turn right by the pink building.

The small plot of land, about 30 feet square, overgrown with weeds and assorted trash, is the home of those three graves, each marked with a wooden cross, and is ostensibly the city’s oldest cemetery. We do not know the identity of those three souls resting there. Local lore has it that the indigenous natives and marauding pirates of the 16th century alike, disposed of their dead in that make shift graveyard facing the bay. Zihuatanejo Bay was the last sheltered bay before Acapulco on the shipping route of the Manilla Galleon and was known to harbor pirates who lay in wait for ships laden with riches from the orient. Approximately 100 years ago, the burial ground extended to a lagoon, lined on each shore with thick mangrove trees that emptied into the bay, and once occupied about two acres of land. The cemetery was abandoned some 70 years ago. The lagoon disappeared when the canal was built in 1975; it was completed in two stages with funding from the state of Guerrero. Whenever new home construction sites began in the vicinity along the western end of Adelita street, workers invariably dug up human skeletons, skulls and indigenous artifacts. No one knows what happened to those human remains but many of the artifacts can be seen at the archeological museum.

Raul Lara Juarez, the jovial proprietor of the Tres Marias hotel and a Zihuatanejo native who lived for many years at La Madera, remembers running many times by the cemetery at dusk when he was not yet eight years old: “My heart was always pounding as I was afraid that some malevolent spirits were after me.”

Near the cemetery, on the same side of the lagoon—according to several native-born sources—stood a fabrica donde prosesaban tortuga, where turtles were processed into food. The turtles were unloaded from pangas to a small cove close to the present pink building, loaded into wooden, iron-wheeled wagons and pushed by hand on iron rails to the plant. The factory operated until the 1960’s.

On the other shore of the lagoon and adjacent to Dr Montejano’s private hospital, stood the municipal abattoir. (One of our Mexican friends stated that the hospitals location is the natural successor to the original slaughterhouse.) Those same sources also told us that when the Vicente Guerrero primary school and the archeological museum were built in the mid-1940’s, workers unearthed scores of animal bones (cattle, pigs, etc.) there.

Lupita Bravo, of Lupita’s clothing store on Calle Juan Alvarez and a Zihuatanejo native, also stated that several years ago a petition was presented to the municipal authorities to declare the cemetery a historical point of interest but as of this writing, City Hall has yet to take any action on the matter.

(Many grateful thanks are due to Sra. Lupita Bravo; Señores Peter Lohr, Hector Olea and Raul Lara Juarez for their invaluable assistance in providing us information for this article.)

Michel Janicot is a writer and a history buff who lives in Grass Valley, CA. where he is a walking tour guide and has written tour guides and books about California history. Janicot has been a repeat visitor to Zihuatanejo for 10 years and has been writing about history and off the beaten path travel for Another Day in Paradise for seven years.

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