The Nautical Stairway Is Back!

We can’t believe it, but Mexico’s ‘Nautical Stairway’ idea is back. About 30 years ago, a private marina company came up with the concept of a ‘stairway’ of harbors and marinas between California and the Pacific Coast of tropical Mexico. It got nowhere.

About a dozen years later, Fonatur, Mexico’s tourist development agency, not only revived the idea, but they acted on it with tons of money. One of the first things they did was build a breakwater at remote Santa Rosalillita on the Pacific Coast of Baja, which was to be the terminus of a proposed ‘land canal’ for boats between the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific. As soon as the breakwater was finished, it started filling with sand, and to our knowledge has never been used.

The rest of the project was to consist of high-end resorts with golf courses and about a dozen new marinas located near similarly new airports. It was a brilliant idea — assuming everybody in California with a boat over 30 feet was going to bring their boats down to Mexico every year. In the end, all that got built were nine marinas, the best known of them at Puerto Escondido, La Paz, Guaymas, Mazatlan and San Blas. Except for Mazatlan, most of them have been, to put it mildly, underachievers.

Previous ‘Stairway’ failures notwithstanding, during a recent tourism festival at Cancun, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto unveiled plans for a new $174 million peso ‘Nautical Stairway’ from Baja Norte as far south as Nayarit (Banderas Bay) "to make of the Sea of Cortez a safe and attractive spot for the practice of sailing and yachting." Isn’t it attractive enough already? We hate to be a killjoy, but mariners haven’t been crying out for such facilities.

And isn’t it oddly comical that just a month after Mexico’s IRS horribly harassed hundreds of perfectly legal boatowners, they are pouring tons of money into making the Sea of Cortez attractive for "sailing and yachting?"

No details on the ‘Stairway’ were released.

There is a lot more tourism investment money headed to Puerto Vallarta and the Riviera Nayarit over the next five years, too. Some $500 million pesos ($38m USD) is earmarked for a new marine terminal in P.V., another $500 million pesos to upgrade the old colonial city center and malecon, and $50 million pesos ($3m USD) for a new terminal at the airport. San Blas, in Nayarit, will get $500 million pesos for tourist development, with the main focus being the historic port. You’ll remember that last month the Governor of Nayarit announced that ground would be broken this November to make tiny San Blas the biggest container port in Latin America.

Skeptical by nature, we’ll believe all these projects when we see them.