Este artÃculo salió el dÃa de ayer en el New York Times…
Playa del Carmen, Mexico РForty miles down the Riviera Maya coast via Mexico 307, I was a world away from the relentless hubbub of Canc̼n, rolling along a narrow, winding flagstone road to the ocean through mangrove so thick that it blocked the sun in spots.
Over the last 15 years, as Cancún’s growth has begun to max out, vacationers and retirees have looked to the Riviera Maya, the 100-mile stretch of blue-green Caribbean and bleached white sand that stretches south to Tulum. There are now a total of 35,000 hotel rooms, condominiums and timeshares on a coast that not long ago was largely fishing villages backed by scrubland and verdant jungle.
The result is a kind of anti-Cancún. That resort town, Mexico’s most famous, is all about the vertical, the high density, the buzz and the next margarita. The Riviera, though, is about the horizontal (resorts can’t be more than four stories), low density (developers can build on only 5 percent of their land), environmental sustainability, diving the world’s second-longest barrier reef (after the Great Barrier in Australia) and climbing the Mayan ruins at Tulum and Coba.
“It’s a few miles down the highway,” said Laura Zapata, president of the Riviera Maya branch of A.M.P.I., the Mexican association of real estate professionals. “But it’s a different universe.”
Certainly, that’s what Ara Der Sarkissian, 36, of Los Angeles, felt he was getting when two years ago he plopped down $1.3 million for a 1,500-square-foot beachfront condo at Rosewood Mayakoba, in the Mayakoba resort complex here being developed by OHL, a Spanish company. Mr. Sarkissian took a second mortgage on property he owns in Los Angeles, where he is a broker at his family’s real estate firm.
“It’s just that the beach was so beautiful,” he said, recalling that he fell in love with the place back in 2007, when he visited while on a cruise to nearby Cozumel. “This property can be anything you want to make of it – formal or laid-back.” Mr. Sarkissian said that because he stayed at the property only five to seven weeks out of the year – Rosewood leases it the remainder of the time – he has been able to pay off his loan and all fees to Rosewood and pocket a little profit most months.
Mexican economic growth forecasters expect the Riviera Maya to experience a 15 to 20 percent decline in sales of such seven-figure-and-up properties, like Banyan Tree’s villas, and so appreciation of existing properties may slow as well. But it will be decelerating from a growth of 19.5 percent in 2007 – which is why Mr. Sarkissian said he thought his property was worth $2 million.
Mr. Sarkissian is one of about 10,000 Americans who are property owners here; they constitute about 5 percent of the Riviera Maya’s total population of 235,000. The rest are an amalgam of Canadians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Mexicans.
Mayakoba – a 1,600-acre development that will eventually feature 1,000 rooms and residences under the flags of Banyan Tree, Fairmont, Viceroy and Rosewood properties – has given the Riviera Maya a bit of a snooty reputation. But it is actually a demographically ecumenical place, one long mall of second-home possibilities that stretches from the lofty heights of Mayakoba to the more modest Playa del Carmen, where Paul Ilg, 75, and his wife, Geri, 69, of Clarkston, Mich., bought a home. The Ilgs decided to live half the year in what is Riviera’s fastest-growing beach town after Mr. Ilg’s retirement a decade ago from General Dynamics.
Though neither speaks much Spanish, plays golf or scuba dives, after a vacation here in 1999 they found a two-bedroom condo in the heart of town for $79,000, which they paid cash for by taking a second mortgage on their home in Michigan. They enjoy long walks along the town’s funky Fifth Avenue – 10 blocks of nonstop restaurants, cantinas, jewelry and T-shirt shops – and the “sweetness” of the town, despite the fact that its population has tripled in the time they’ve lived there. It doesn’t hurt that Mr. Ilg estimates that his condo has appreciated to $180,000. (This kind of value is another reason that the American contingent here may be the only truly happy American homeowners I’ve spoken to lately.)
George Williams, a retired printing company owner from Seagoville, Tex., visited the region five years ago on a dive trip to Cozumel. He and his wife had always loved the beach life, and so he did some whimsical home hunting in Playa and bought a lot for $150,000 in one of its original gated communities. An airy, 4,000-square foot, $500,000 hacienda wasn’t far behind. “I wake up to the sounds of tropical birds,” he said. “We have our own iguana out back. That money’s in a better place than it could be. I’m a happy man.”
Mr. Williams’s neighborhood has the air of an established suburb in Southern California. But for a more bohemian feel – and prices – the town of Puerto Morelos, about 20 miles north of Playa del Carmen, is probably the ticket.
“You tell me where you can get beachfront anywhere else in the world for under $300,000,” said Amber Pierce-Schulz, a local real estate agent, after showing me a one-bedroom, 800-square-foot condominium on the water.
The newest boomtown is Tulum, where the main draw is the ruins of a Mayan seaport. The Riviera can keep propagating fresh generations of condos and villas in a wide range of niches because of that endless beach Рdevelopment theoretically can extend another 50 miles south of Tulum, with the exception of lands protected by an ecological reserve, to the border with Belize. But the real secret to its success may have more to do with Canc̼n and less to do with that vast coastline.
The Riviera Maya may pose as an anti-Cancún, but it benefits a great deal from the Mexican government’s emphasis on public safety and quality health care in and around its most valuable resort town. Though Mexico’s nationalized health care system ranks 61st out of 190 systems rated in the world by the World Health Organization in 2000 – the last time the group did the survey – care there can cost less than half what it does in the United States, which was ranked 37th in the same survey.
Public safety in Mexico is difficult to make sweeping assurances about these days. But most of the drug cartel violence that has received so much publicity has usually occurred in the nation’s border towns.
Ultimately, a bigger problem for the Riviera Maya may be continuing to live up to its promise of delivering beauty without the excesses of Cancún. A drive through Tulum revealed the good news that, on the beach side, developments are adhering to low-rise, low-density dictates; but also the bad news that, on the inland side, where developments of “shoe box” housing are serving buyers seeking less expensive homes, the beginnings of a backslide can be seen.
It’s hard to know if development on Cancún’s scale is inevitable, but if that happens, it most likely won’t be because of Ray Graham, 74, of Latrobe, Pa., who was relaxing at his hacienda near Bacalar – said by some to be the next Tulum. Insects swarmed through the air, and the humidity from the nearby lagoon made it difficult to breathe, giving the setting more an aura of the Mosquito Coast than any riviera.
But Mr. Graham and his wife, Reba, 70, had found what they wanted. “We like it out here,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow and gazing at the jungle surrounding them. “It’s away from all that in Cancún. Away from everything.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/greathomesanddestinations/02Riviera.html?8dpc
