Can Mexicos Wild Baja California Endure New Marinas?
It catches my eye because there’s nothing on it just woven scrub in subtle shades of green, rose, and brown. No mini-ranchos, no garish signs. A promise of wild Baja California, Baja incognita, the Baja of legend that lies to the south. Between the booming border zone (Tijuana to Ensenada, with a population of 1,600,000) and the tourist enclave of Los Cabos, a thousand miles (1,600 kilometers) south at the peninsula’s tip, wild lands and wild seas are still the rule. Yachts face long distances between refueling points on both coasts. And on this inconvenience the Mexican government of Vicente Fox has hung possibly the most ambitious, contentious project for tourism development in the Western Hemisphere: the Escalera Nautica (“nautical stairway”). “It’s a multiple ecological rape of the peninsula,” declares Alfonso Aguirre, an oceanographer and Ensenada businessman. Over the next decade, the Fox government proposes to complete a chain of 27 marina-resorts, none more than 130 miles (200
