Coastal landscape of bacalar lagoon (Quintana Roo, Mexico): Land occupation and production of the imaginarium for tourism

Abstract

The key objectives of this work are to analyze the socio-economic implications arising from the growth of tourism in the coast of Bacalar lagoon (Quintana Roo, Mexico), particularly those related to land tenure; and to analyze the local tourist discourse produced by the public policy of the Pueblos Mágicos (Magic Towns) Program. We conducted an extensive search of literature and documents, supplemented by field work including semi-structured interviews applied to members of the business, public, and farming sectors, as well as to organizations of the civil society. Maps were constructed based on a participatory cartography that involved land owners, and through the visual interpretation of high-resolution Google Earth (2012) satellite images, which made possible to understand and reconstruct the recent occupation process of the Bacalar Lagoon littoral. The socio-economic intensification process related to tourism and its effect on the change of land use were studied in four localities of the Bacalar municipality situated on the coast of the lagoon or very close to it: Bacalar, Aaron Merino Fernández, Buenavista and Pedro Antonio Santos. In recent years, the economy of these localities (in both the agriculture and the business sectors) and the different levels of government have been incorporated to the tourist market in two specific ways. On the one hand, the marketing of farming land located near the lagoon began in Bacalar from the decade of 1960 and resumed and intensified in the past two decades; on the other, the Magical Towns Program is an ongoing initiative that started in in 2006, promoted by the Secretariat of Tourism of the Mexican government. Tourist occupation of the coast has been materialized by the construction of temporary-residence houses both along the lagoon littoral and in the localities as such. This residential growth has undergone several stages whose social, economic and environmental processes are detailed in the body of this work. These include the strong pressures by economic agents (real estate, entrepreneurs, and government officials with political power, among others) to achieve the marketing of agricultural land. The Magical Towns Program that lies within the larger context above has focused primarily on the town of Bacalar (municipal seat), associated with changes in infrastructure and urban image of downtown Bacalar carried out by the local government, based on the adoption of architectural elements resembling those in other towns of Mexico, which has produced a diffuse staging and cultural identity for both visitors and local residents. These modifications aim to favor mainly local entrepreneurs in the accommodation sector. In parallel with this process, real estate speculation has gained momentum as the value of farming land increased, more so when Bacalar became an independent municipality in 2011. The overall findings of this study highlight that Bacalar lagoon has been a key driver in the reconfiguration of landscape and the local dynamics of tourism, related to the real estate development of temporary residences and the emergence of a spatial imaginarium marketed as a tourist attraction linked with the forced creation of a “Magic Town”. Although the two processes occurred in different times, these were linked, on the one hand, by the conditions of land value and, on the other hand, by the production of the imaginarium from the aesthetic value of the lagoon; the spatial outcome has been a tourist residential area along the littoral of the lagoon, resulting from the constant speculation developed over recent decades. Of this speculative process, 45% of land use along the lagoon coast corresponds to temporary residence households with negative impacts derived from the lack of urban planning, in evident opposition to the economic benefits generated by the sale of farming land. In general, the implementation of the Magic Towns Program has produced economic benefits for the locality, but under strong socioeconomic inequalities in the outskirts.