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Turtles, Si, Resort, No, on Riviera Maya Beach

Author: Bob Morris
After two years of protests from environmental groups, an international hotel chain says it has cancelled plans to build a 450-room resort on a pristine stretch of the Yucatan Peninsula that is prime nesting ground for endangered sea turtles.

Sol Melia, a Spanish-owned company that operates hotels in 23 countries, bought X'cacel (shkah-SELL), a well-established nature preserve, from the state of Quintana Roo in 1998. The US$2.2 million dollar purchase brought immediate accusations of shady dealings involving former Governor Mario Villanueva, who disappeared in 1999 after indictments stemming from other charges of political corruption.

The beach at X'cacel, about 70 miles south of Cancun, is one of the world's most important nesting areas for loggerhead and Atlantic green sea turtles. At the height of the summer nesting season, dozens of 400-pound female loggerheads crawl up on the silvery sands every evening and painstakingly dig holes into which they drop as many as 100 eggs. In recent years, many Mexican families have begun making trips to X'cacel just to witness the spectacle.

But this part of the Yucatan Caribbean coast, often called the Riviera Maya, is at the crux of Mexico's future tourism economy. The success of such relatively new resort cities as Cancun and Playa del Carmen has prompted development to inch its way south.

And X'cacel was where Mexican environmentalists, backed by a long list of international groups, drew a line in the sand.

"Sol Melia will not build a hotel in X'cacel," said Kathy Hernandez, a spokesperson for the company. "That whole area has been good for Sol Melia in the past, so we might build elsewhere in Quintana Roo."

Hernandez said Sol Melia, which owns four resorts in Cancun and Cozumel, had not decided what it intends to do with the property at X'cacel.

While environmentalists were pleased with the Sol Melia decision, some greeted it with a degree of skepticism.

"I hope it's true. And I hope they really have cancelled their plans," said Mary Louise Whitlow, of Dallas, Texas, who has been involved with several groups opposing the resort. "But we have heard them [Sol Melia] make this kind of statement before, only to go ahead with their plans anyway. We'll wait and see."

-- Bob Morris

Posted online 04/01/00.

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