Back in the day

A foto I've never seen before. Hotel Melaque back in it's prime

Current issue with Hotel Melaque

Talking to a local friend about what's up with the hotel and he says that General Marcelino Garcia Barragan, former Secretary of Defense and former Jalisco Governor  was behind the construction along with his Tecuan property and other projects in the area.  He somehow talked a few Ejido Emiliano Zapata (Ranchito) members into "leasing" the land with only a verbal agreement and agreed the property would revert to the Ejido when he died.  Maybe everything was done that way back in the '50's.  Now it's a battle between the Barragan family and the Ejido.   He also said that whole area is fill for elevation since it used to become a river mouth in the summer.   That's the rumor anyway  ...

Melaque 1955

Here's an excerpt from the book The Magic of Careyes which is basically a coffee table foto album but does have some info on the history of Careyes and the Costalegre:

The Jalisco coast had remained pristine until 1944, halfway through the twentieth century, when the state governor, General Marcelino García Barragán, introduced an initiative called Marcha hacia el mar (“March to the Sea”). García Barragán had a road built from Guadalajara to Melaque, to allow ranchers to settle that part of Jalisco. He himself claimed ownership of a beach called El Tecuán. The story of the coastal colonization he initiated would later become the subject of Agustín Yáñez’s novel La tierra pródiga (“The Prodigal Land”), written in the late 1950s, during the years that Yáñez himself served as governor of Jalisco.

In his novel, Yáñez reflected on the natural resources of the state’s coastal regions, which had been monopolized by lumber companies, land usurpers, cattle thieves and horse thieves. He was very skeptical about colonization, after seeing the destruction that the March to the Sea had caused in Melaque: “Heavy equipment kept arriving […] advancing heavily, slowly, inexorably. They tore down trees, broke down mountains, filled abysses. […] Monstrous tractors, gigantic bulldozers, colossal scrapers and enormous dump trucks. They came from the East, the North, the South, marching toward the sea.” Yáñez’s world was peopled with fascinating, crooked caciques (land owners) such as El Amarillo, the novel’s main character, based on Rodolfo Paz Vizcaíno, owner of Tenacatita ranch. Guillermo Gargollo knew him well. “The legend (of his own fabrication) has it that he was a brutal man, who had killed many people. Later, I realized it wasn’t true, but still, we were scared of him.”

On one of Gargollo’s trips to the coast, he discovered that Paz Vizcaíno had stolen their equipment in Cuixmala in order to build access roads to the beaches in Tenacatita. He built a hotel there and named it Los Ángeles Locos . Paz Vizcaíno had always been a fortunate man, but he never had the chance to stay at that hotel, and ended up losing it along with the rest of his properties, which were repossessed after he was charged with fraud involving the Banco Regional de Crédito de Occidente. The story did not end well: he was sent to prison, and then to a mental hospital, or so they say.

 
And then ... a web site I had not seen (hard to tell what is truth or from the book)
Rodolfo Paz - Tenacatita Visionary

In the fifties, Rodolfo Paz Vizcaino had a dream: to found a city in the middle of nowhere which would become the tourist destination that the country needed. This is the tale of his dream, the story of a person who had everything and ended up with nothing.

Rodolfo Paz - Tenacatita Visionary

Casa Grande Hotel Melaque

Every now and then I search for info on the Casa Grande Hotel in Melaque that was destroyed in the 1995 earthquake. Just change your key-word on Google and you come up with a whole new set of info or pictures.

Anyway, a few days ago I came across the first foto below on enFotos.com. The caption says from the '60's but I've always heard it was built in the '70's. Then I remembered Blogger Steve sent me a foto dated 1970 and the hotel is considerably larger than the new picture.

I introduced the foto on TomZap and with many opinions (gotta love opinions), it was agreed it is the same building not long after it was constructed ... in the 1960's. We also found out that the hotel started out as Hotel Melaque, changed sometime in the '80's to the CoCo Club and ended it's life as the Casa Grande. I took the last foto today

1960's picture of the Hotel Melaque

1970 is still Hotel Melaque

Casa Grande bar bill

Current condition of the hotel

Hotel Melaque in 1970

Not the most definitive pictures of the old hotel but there are so few. These were taken by Bill Bartlett in 1970 when it was fairly new (when was it built?). I've seen in the past fotos of the hotel in various beach bars but the pictures were brown and weather worn.

A number of years ago a woman offered me fotos of the interior ... the lobby, 'grand staircase' and the restaurant. She only had the physical paper fotos and was going to send them to me to scan ... but she never sent them.

If you didn't know this hotel was destroyed in the 1995 quake due to two large water tanks above the third floor not being supported properly

Hotel and Melaque from what is now the Malecon

From the beach in front of Hotel Melaque