Mexico’s Islas Marias: from jail to vacationer attraction

One in all Mexico’s most infamous prisons begins a brand new chapter this weekend as a Pacific Ocean getaway after a makeover geared toward bringing in vacationers to the previous penal colony.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Friday night opened the Islas Marias Vacationer Middle, bidding to show the decades-old federal jail within the Islas Marias archipelago into an environmental attraction and place for historical past lovers.

“That is tourism for excursions, to discover, to stay with nature,” Lopez Obrador stated this week. “To recreate historical past, it is one thing distinctive, extraordinary.”

Alongside villas to lodge friends, a restaurant, a restaurant and seashores, the revamped web site consists of an arch named after Nelson Mandela, who spent some 18 years behind bars on South Africa’s Robben Island earlier than being elected president of the nation.

Mandela is “an instance that even behind jail partitions, beliefs and alter can stay on for many who need to change historical past,” Mexico’s authorities stated in a promotional video.

The outside of the brand new Islas Marias cultural heart.

Raquel Cunha/Reuters

Positioned about 62 miles off the western state of Nayarit, the Islas Marias turned a jail in 1905 underneath dictator Porfirio Diaz and was in virtually fixed use till it was closed by Lopez Obrador in 2019.

The penitentiary as soon as housed many political prisoners, together with Jose Revueltas, an influential Mexican author imprisoned a number of occasions for his left-wing activism.

The federal government has introduced vacationer packages to the islands, with ferries to the primary settlement of Puerto Balleto beginning subsequent week. The middle can be run by the Mexican Navy and is a part of a protected UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

Mexico has loved a post-pandemic vacationer increase, with worldwide arrivals to the nation rising by 56.4% in the course of the first 10 months of 2022 in contrast with the identical interval final yr, and up 7.3% compared to 2019.