Save Eco Destinations

La Zebra Beach Cantina & Cabanas in Tulum, MX spent much of 2008 converting their beach hotel into a green haven.

No electricity on the beach meant they had to make their own, as they wanted their guests to be able to check their email and get cold drinks 24/7. Six-kw wind turbines solved that issue. Next: how to dispose of sewage. As you know, most hotels pump their sewage into the ground (they want to share it with everyone—how generous!). La Zebra wanted to take a different approach, so they set up two Bio-Microbics FAST systems that produce recyclable, 99% clean water. Apparently, other hotels’ systems in Tulum produce less than 70% clean water and are often unreliable, thus polluting surrounding ecosystems.

For the water itself, they turned to a well with a low salt content water, which they combined with fresh water they get delivered to their premises daily by truck (how green is this, exactly?). No mention as to where the water comes from, or the carbon footprint involved in this ordeal.

They have their own organic herb and vegetable garden yielding mint, sugar cane, basil, passion fruit, and other delicious foods and practice composting and recycling of plastic and aluminum products. And they show their love for the ecosystem by doing their part to protect turtle eggs from poachers by way of patrols on ATVs, who collect the eggs and “protect” them.

For 2009, there are plans of a solar hot water system and a reverse osmosis water purification system for creating drinking water onsite.

Now, on their blog, La Zebra boasts that their “cocktails … are actually really really healthy”:

“First we started with the La Zebra margarita, which is made with fresh pineapple juice, fresh lime juice, a pinch grated ginger, a dash of organic agave honey and topped with good quality tequila.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, that sounds pretty tasty. But touting cocktails as healthy seems misleading to me. Pineapple juice and agave honey (actually agave nectar, which tastes like honey but is plant-derived) equal a lot of sugar, simple carbohydrates. The vitamin C in the pineapple and the lime disappear within the first 10 minutes of the fruit being juiced. Ginger is wonderful for the immune system, but a pinch may not do it. And “good quality tequila” neither tells us which brand we’d be getting, nor is healthy in any way. While I love imaginative and delectable cocktails, I do not appreciate attempts at fooling me into thinking my margarita is a superfood.

This leads me to wonder whether other highlights of the resort are exaggerated or misleading, but I’m probably just being cynical.

Has anyone been to La Zebra who could share his or her opinions?

While tourism shrinks and projects in Mexico become paralyzed as a result of the global economic crisis, an exclusive hotel development emerges on the Riviera Maya.

Catering to the elite, this new development is placing its bets on nature conservation, as it plants itself on stilts amid mangrove swamps and employs novel energy-saving technologies.

We are referring to the Hacienda Tres Ríos, the first of five luxury hotels to be built on a 130 hectare lot on the Riviera Maya, where an eco-tourism park used to be.

I just came across this post on the Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree. It starts with some quotes from an online article discussing the Tulum situation, and continues with the commentaries on each quote:

“Hotel owners argue they’ve been there for up to two decades without problems, and their businesses are built around protecting the environment.”
Hotel owners have had a free ride for 20 years and are now paying the price-they knew this was coming-have known for years in fact.”Roberto Palazuelos, a Mexican soap opera actor and president of the Tulum Hotel Owners Association, says the federal government’s paperwork to create the protected area in the 1980s was never done correctly. His Hotel Diamante K is among the five that have been closed.”
That’s what his lawyer is telling him-and will keep telling him as long as he’s being paid.“I think they want to take away the land and divide it between themselves,” he said.
If only life were so simple.

Okay, so whoever wrote this (hardnosethehighway) has absolutely no clue (with all due respect) about the property situation in Tulum. Aside from the fact that most lots on the Tulum beach have at least two or more owners (yes, with title and all), there’s the ejido situation (in the South part of the hotel zone, where the government both gave the land to indigenous groups (ejido) and also sold the same land as private property), there’s this current problem in the Northern part of the hotel zone, near the archaeological site: the government both issued land titles and declared the same property as a national park.

So the question is: who’s right here? Well, it’s both a national park and private property, so technically both sides are right. It’s up to the Mexican judicial system to figure out what to do here, and the hotels are obviously appealing the foreclosure. So saying the hotels have had a “free ride” for years is quite inaccurate. The hotel owners (Roberto Palazuelos included) purchased property with a title. These same property owners have been paying property tax and federal zone taxes (for use of the beach) for years. They’re hardly squatters.

Should they have done a little more research before purchasing? Maybe, but there are few areas in Mexico that have the complex land issues that Tulum and the surrounding area have. Tulum is located within Quintana Roo, Mexico’s youngest state. And it’s not always easy to determine the entire situation of each property: with multiple titles and the government doing whatever it feels like (ejido/park/titles), sometimes the status of land is totally unclear.

If the land is actually used as a national park and is duly protected by the government, a decision to favor the park might be in the best interest for the area, ecologically speaking. But many in the area fear that it’s just an excuse by the government to take over the land, and then re-sell it yet again to a major developer. Which, of course, would be an eco disaster and would change forever the peaceful eco paradise that Tulum has been until now.

Francisco Canul. Amidst other blunders to his name, Luis Jorge Morales Arjona, a Profepa officer in Quintana Roo, publicly confirmed that the Hotel Eurostars Blue Tulum is in fact owned by the Bribiesca Sahagun brothers. He also turned out to be a liar and corrupt because said resort began construction in 2002, and not before the 1981 executive order that gave rise to Tulum’s National Park, as he’d publicly stated. Morales Arjona told a newspaper that the properties owned by the Bribiesca Sahagun family would be sanctioned, as he assured that the resort located within the National Park date back to before the executive order… Quequi