Mexico: a perfect beach saved from developers

Picture a perfect beach. From an expanse of flawless white sand, implausibly turquoise water shelves out over a stoneless seabed to a clear horizon. Overhead, pelicans wheel lazily in search of fish. One suddenly folds its wings, like a prehistoric umbrella, and hurtles downward. The splashdown is the first sound you can remember hearing for several minutes.

Now imagine a whacking great hotel plonked on all this; plus a golf course and a few jetskis, of course, just to keep the decibel levels up. This is the fate that has befallen so many of the world’s idyllic places that there seems something almost inevitable about it. Thanks to a determined and organised grassroots campaign, however, it won’t be happening on this particular, Mexican strand.

Balandra beach, outside the city of La Paz, state capital of Baja California Sur, has been spared from future development after residents, civil society groups and environmentalists organised themselves into a collective, amassing a petition of 18,440 signatures calling on the regional authorities to protect the area. On March 25, after a protracted struggle by the Colectivo Balandra, state officials finally designated a total of 2,131 hectares of land and sea a Natural Protected Area, in a move that could signal a shift in Mexico’s approach to tourism and conservation.

From The Guardian: Read more