Acapulco Mounts a Make-Over

It wasn’t so many years ago when contestants on TV game shows shrieked with delight at hearing these words: “And your first prize is an all-expenses-paid vacation for two in . . . sunny Acapulco!”

The original jet-set mecca and a getaway for Hollywood stars in the 1950s and ‘60s, Acapulco long ago slipped from the spotlight. As dazzling younger starlets like Cancun and Los Cabos took center stage, the grand diva of Mexican beach resorts became something of a faded, overly made-up vamp.

Now Acapulco is working hard to restore its luster, hoping to leverage its funky night life, tropical setting and 400 years of history into a revival like that of Miami Beach’s South Beach.

“In a very short time, we are going to win back our world No. 1 status,” vowed Alfonso Arnold, who founded the area’s scuba diving industry 40 years ago and is a civic champion of the make-over.

Acapulco’s population ballooned from 30,000 in the 1930s to nearly 1 million today, fueling ill-planned growth. People filled shantytowns perched on the hillsides and overwhelmed the city’s meager infrastructure. Pollution flowed into Acapulco Bay, and the streets and beaches became packed with annoying vendors.

The “Pearl of the Pacific” hit its low point in October 1997 with the devastating Hurricane Pauline, which killed an estimated 400 people and exposed problems, like poor drainage, that had slowly mounted since the late 1970s.

Devastating as it was, the hurricane proved to be a catalyst for the city’s rebirth. City elders and activists reassessed their problems and their future. A flurry of joint government-industry planning followed.

Now Acapulco is completing a burst of hotel renovations and infrastructure projects ranging from new roads to sewage treatment plants that are cleaning up the bay. Public- and private-sector investments of $1.2 billion are committed for the next two years.

Civic groups are redesigning avenues and public spaces, artists are creating audacious works to adorn streets and buildings, and the city is preparing a vast “New Millennium” bash along the four-mile shore and across the horseshoe-shaped bay.

“With this initiative, Acapulco can draw more investment and generate enormous prospects, at levels that Cancun and Los Cabos are enjoying today,” said Oscar Flores, coordinator of Pacific Coast beach resorts for the Mexican Ministry of Tourism.

Some independent analysts are skeptical that Acapulco will ever reclaim its tourism crown. Travelers’ habits have changed, and people are seeking more tranquil escapes. Nevertheless, Lynne Bairstow, co-author of Frommer’s 1999 Mexican guidebook, applauds the city’s effort to exploit its historic architecture and high-energy beachfront boulevard.

“It brings in the night life, the funky aspects of Acapulco,” she said. “I am impressed with a lot of the things Acapulco is doing.”

The city is now looking toward California and the western United States as its natural international market--including Mexican Americans who have succeeded in the U.S. and can now afford to visit a nostalgic destination back home that was once beyond their reach.

Acapulco can certainly trade on the lure of its past: John and Jackie Kennedy (and Bill and Hillary Clinton) honeymooned here. And the city boasts mystery: Magnate Howard Hughes spent the last four months of his life hidden in a penthouse of the Acapulco Princess Hotel in 1976.

While Acapulco faded, Mexican tourism overall has thrived--surpassing oil exports as Mexico’s second-largest earner of foreign exchange. An estimated 20 million foreign visitors will spend about $8 billion in 1999. The industry generates 8.2% of Mexico’s gross national product and employs 1.7 million people.

Mexico’s 10 Pacific Coast resort areas, from Loreto in Baja California to Huatulco in southern Oaxaca state, have been the backbone of the tourism boom. They account for just over one-third of Mexico’s 153,000 hotel rooms. Filling those beds has helped fuel the nation’s recovery since the mid-1990s recession.

But those successes have made Acapulco’s fall seem all the more stark.

The city suffered a 37% drop in foreign visitors from 1986 to 1997, to just 346,000 a year. There was a corresponding decline in overseas flights to Acapulco, from 2,577 to 1,430 a year, and a slide in hotel occupancy from 50% to 42% in the same period.

While Acapulco has become more popular among Mexicans themselves, that fact hasn’t come close to making up for the loss of big-spending foreigners. It has also changed the character of the place to a lower-cost resort without the glamour of the old days.

A joint business-government report in December noted with unusual frankness that “Acapulco confronts a severe problem of loss of competitiveness in its tourism offerings” compared with other destinations.

A key problem was complacency, many industry officials say, as Mexico was methodically developing other resorts, such as Puerto Vallarta, that overtook Acapulco.

“We went to sleep a bit, thinking nobody could touch us,” said Juan de Pablos, general manager of the landmark Las Brisas Hotel.

Las Brisas is an example of the legend and promise of Acapulco. Perched on a hillside around the bay from the city center, the hotel opened in 1954 with nine chalets. Within a few years, it had developed its famed pink-and-white bungalows, now numbering 300 and most with a private swimming pool, into a world-renowned honeymoon hotel.

Across the bay is La Quebrada, the much-filmed cliff where young divers plunge 115 feet into a narrow ravine. They claim the Guinness Book of Records mark for the highest dives in the world, and draw hundreds of ooh-ing tourists every day.

This area is the traditional Acapulco where the Kennedys honeymooned and where Hotel Flamingos served as the private getaway of stars like John Wayne, Red Skelton, Cary Grant and Dolores del Rio. Wayne bought the hotel in 1954 and closed it to the public, keeping it just for his friends for the next six years. Its still-charming and simple $50-a-night rooms peer out over the sea from atop a 500-foot cliff.

Wayne later built his own mansion on a point nearby and was said to have hurled empty tequila bottles off the cliff onto the rocks below.

This fall, near the same spot, Acapulco civic leaders hope to sink an old U.S. Navy destroyer to create an artificial reef where snorkelers and divers can enjoy the rich fish life. Roqueta Island, half a mile across the channel, is to be declared a nature reserve.

Eduardo Marron, the Guerrero state tourism secretary and a former hotel manager, thinks Acapulco should augment its sun and sand and nightclubs by exploiting nearby resources to become an eco-tourism destination.

“We have archeological jewels within 25 miles; there are famous caves inland,” he said.

But some outsiders are wary of ill-conceived ideas for reviving Acapulco, a Nahuatl Indian word meaning “where the reeds are broken.”

Bairstow, the Frommer’s author and a former vice president of Merrill Lynch who has settled in Puerto Vallarta, said Acapulco should play to its traditional strengths--lively urban beaches, great nightclubs and restaurants. It would be fatal, she said, to try to make it an eco-tourist destination.

“There are plenty of travelers who want a great time at night, who want that high-energy, Rio type of flash,” she said. “And there’s no better place to go out and do night life than Acapulco. When you see the lights of that bay below you, you cannot help but get drawn into it.”

Beyond the old harbor and around the sweeping bay is the hotel row known as Golden Acapulco, a curving avenue of nightclubs, designer shops and restaurants that has long defined Acapulco. Major hotel upgrades have improved the Fiesta Americana, the Hyatt and other big hotels over the past two years.

This is where city officials hope to press home the analogy with Miami Beach’s art-deco restorations. Over the next few weeks, Latin American and Spanish artists will create a series of huge outdoor artworks on block-long walls and draped from buildings.

“I knew the Acapulco of yesterday,” said Xane Vazquez, the Mexico City art promoter who dreamed up the project. “There was a process of deterioration, but Acapulco is totally savable. They are now taking the right steps to rescue one of the most beautiful bays in the world.”

Miguel Angel Hernandez, responsible for beach and water quality, dispatches 22 powerboat sweepers into the bay each day to keep the water clean. More important, he noted, major sewage system upgrades since 1997 have fully separated rainwater drainage from sewage lines, halting discharges into the bay. He said the bay now meets strict water quality standards.

Acapulco is also trying to recapture its role as a favorite locale for filmmakers, who like not only the classic beaches but also features such as the exotic jungle mangrove swamps that ring the bay. “Rambo II” was filmed in the Pie de la Cuesta lagoon in 1985--one of more than 250 movies that have been shot in Acapulco.

Fifteen film projects are scheduled over the next two years. An Italian film festival begins next year, joining the annual Black and French film festivals.

“A theme of the revival is going to be Acapulco: mecca of cinema,” state tourism boss Marron said.

One problem that still plagues Acapulco is the throngs of hawkers marching up and down the beaches, thrusting T-shirts, tacos and trinkets upon tourists trying to relax. As the controls on vendors have tightened in old Acapulco, the hawkers have moved to the open-sea Revolcadero beach fronting the most luxurious hotels.

Locals say the hawkers are a vestige of the greedy corruption that had long damaged Acapulco: Politicians had won support in return for letting people invade fragile hillsides and sell on the beaches.

That, in turn, reflects an important difference between Acapulco and the “instant” resorts across Mexico that have stolen so much of its business: Acapulco has a history, for better and worse.