The construction of a marina and the diversion of the Santiago Creek for the Costa Palmas tourism and real estate project by the company Desarrolladora La Ribera has modified the coastline and put at risk the right to fish of 80 fishermen in the community of La Ribera, Baja California Sur.
In some stretches the beach has eroded and in others it has gained ground from the sea, a process known as accretion. In this last case, the project has appropriated the land left by the retreat of the sea and has obtained the concession of the Federal Maritime Terrestrial Zone (Zofemat), which is equivalent to 20 meters wide adjacent to the sea.
Due to the increase in the beach, the fishermen’s concession is no longer on the seashore, but about 200 meters inland on an area that is no longer useful for beaching and unbeaching their boats.
“At that time, the sea washed the sand about 200 meters further up. Later, Costa Palmas gained land from the sea, the beach retreated and the sea grew further away,” explained Mario Leal Armenta, secretary of the Federation of Cooperative Societies of Southern Los Cabos, which groups nine cooperatives, including Cooperativa Leal, of which he is a member.
According to Leal, neither of the two concessions fulfills the objective for which they were granted, since the one for Costa Palmas is for conservation, and the one for fishermen is for beaching and unbeaching boats, uses that are not currently given to them.
For this reason, fishermen have been demanding for a year that the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) revoke both concessions and give the City Council of Los Cabos a provisional destination agreement to maintain public use of the beach.
“With the provisional destination agreement, the municipality would be in charge of managing the area and then they will decide whether it is granted to the community, the federation or the cooperatives, but right now what we want is for the community of La Ribera not to lose the beaches and for them to remain for common use,” said Leal.
For this report, Causa Natura Media contacted the company Desarrolladora La Ribera through the communication channels available to Costa Palmas and up to the time of publication there has been no response.
Tourism of “sun and… beach?”
Costa Palmas settled in 2006 in front of a 3.2 kilometer beach in an area of 360 hectares of communal land at the mouth of the Santiago Creek, which has a fan shape 4.3 kilometers wide. The site was a coastal wetland with nine hectares of water bodies, 5.9 hectares of dunes and 1.9 hectares of palm trees, which were removed or filled in to stabilize the soil.
The stream contributed sediment to an extensive 7.8-kilometer beach of fine golden sand. There, approximately 100 fishermen, organized into four cooperatives, worked on the wide beach in front of the town and left their boats stranded on concession DGZF-636/01, which they have maintained and shared since 1994. It is 400 meters long and 20 meters wide, under a title in the name of the Punta La Ribera Cooperative.
Before Costa Palmas, the beach used to be the community’s public square, that is, the meeting place par excellence, noted the thesis of Carmina Valiente, research professor at the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur.
The fishermen were the ones who had the most obvious occupation with the enramadas, structures made of date palm leaves, where they took refuge from the heat on the seashore and filleted the fish after their work at sea.
“The beach and the enramadas were our second home. We would go there to chat, to have a drink, a few beers, to cook some fish, to hang out with our friends. Now there is nothing, there are no enramadas on the beach, nor is there the large palapa that was there and that suddenly disappeared. Little by little they have been dismantling us,” said Leal.
Ten years ago Leal had his own enramada on the beach but when it fell and he tried to lift it, the management of Zofemat in Los Cabos denied him this possibility. Thus, one by one, the enramadas disappeared.
There are still younger fishermen like Roberto Minjares, a member of the Pescadores del Cortés cooperative, who saw the beach free, where they could beach and unbeach without any problem. However, that has changed.
“The year 2006 marks a before and after in the history of the great transformation that we have today,” said Reina Macklis, a resident of the community. Between 2006 and 2008, the company Desarrolladora La Ribera received environmental authorizations from Semarnat to build the mega nautical and residential project known today as Costa Palmas, which included a beach club, a commercial area, a 57-hectare golf course, 300 hotel rooms, 800 condominium units and 945 residential lots.
The first thing they did was fence the 360-hectare land and only left one access in the middle of the 3.2 kilometers of beach front.
In 2008, they received authorizations for the construction of a residential nautical subdivision, navigation channels, a commercial area, lots on the canal, a service area, lots adjacent to the marina, a beach club, lots facing the sea and two 200-meter breakwaters (north and south) for the access channel, which they modified with a 157-meter extension to the north breakwater in 2018.
“From the beginning (the marina) was not well designed and was not evaluated correctly. Sediment began to enter the navigation channels, it became silted up, they had to be dredging continuously and it was unsustainable in the long term,” said Sarahí Gómez, research coordinator at the Mexican Center for Environmental Law (Cemda).
Erosion and accretion are natural processes on the coast, but these can be exacerbated by human activities. According to Enrique Nava, a research professor at the Interdisciplinary Center for Marine Sciences at the National Polytechnic Institute, the infrastructures that generate the most impact in this sense are the breakwaters and jetties.
The jetties are stone structures in the sea placed vertically or horizontally to deflect the impact of the waves and protect the ports. However, the big problem with these structures is that on one side they retain sediment and on the other side they promote erosion.
Another factor that accelerated the accretion and erosion of beaches was the channeling work of the Santiago Stream, which claimed its channel and caused havoc in adjacent areas of Costa Palmas, flooding the golf courses, for example.
In 2018, the company received authorization from Semarnat to build two walls and confine the stream bed on both sides. The left side is about to be built, while the right side has a length of 7.7 kilometers with heights from 2.77 to five meters and was inaugurated in September 2023. From then on, the stream is confined and runs in a narrower channel than its natural course.
The confinement has as a consequence that the sand that it transported and that was previously distributed throughout the entire mouth of the stream, now only comes out through a narrow section of the beach, which forms a mound that is more difficult for the waves to move and distribute among all the beaches, explained Armando Trasviña Castro, senior researcher at the Scientific Research and Higher Education Center of Ensenada, La Paz Unit.
“The channeling work creates an alteration in the dynamics of sand transport on the coast and the breakwater will also retain the sediment that should supply the beaches to the south. It is like shooting yourself in the foot because that sand is what creates our beaches, and the beaches create the dune and the dune creates the protection of the coastline. It is precisely what should not be done in the rest of the state,” said Trasviña.
The diversion of the stream has exacerbated the impacts of the breakwaters on the beaches to the south. On the side where the El Surgidero beach or central beach is, there was erosion of the beach to the point that it put the marina and the residences of the project at risk.
The “sun and beach” tourism, an attraction of Costa Palmas, began to be left without the latter, so in 2020 the Developer La Ribera submitted to Semarnat a project for rehabilitation and stabilization in the beach area in front of Costa Palmas, and thus reduce the eroded sites, as indicated in the Environmental Impact Statement.
This project was authorized in 2021 and consisted of the installation of seven sand islands and three breakwaters, three protective dikes, and beach filling to cover the dikes and recover the width of the beach that previously existed.
“The impact (due to erosion) was too much and obviously the interests of the project were already at stake because they were completely losing the beach. This speaks of how the poor design of the project began to have consequences and led to the undertaking of rehabilitation actions, and that there was also no correct evaluation regarding the impacts and adequate mitigation measures were not established,” said Gómez.
He added that Desarrolladora La Ribera was reported to Profepa for starting the rehabilitation works before having authorization from Semarnat. However, the complaints did not prosper.
For Valiente, Costa Palmas is a high-risk investment, which was planned on paper, but which has had difficulties in its realization, which has raised construction costs and with it the urgency to continue with the work at all costs.
Fishermen without a beach
The fishermen saw how the area in front of their concession slowly grew and moved them away from the coast. With the dredging of the marina, their beaches went from being clean sand to being filled with rocks.
At the beginning of 2024, the fishermen requested a dock for the cooperatives and the permit holders, which consisted of a body of water with jetties and docks to beach and unbeach boats. During this process they learned that the land reclaimed from the sea in front of their concession and a new concession at the foot of the beach belonged to Desarrolladora La Ribera.
In 2017, the General Directorate of Zofemat and Coastal Environments of Semarnat renewed the concession to the Punta La Ribera Fishing Cooperative for a period of 15 years, covering an area of 7,986 square meters and 400 meters long. The use covered by the title is exclusively for fishing use, that is, to beach and unbeach boats.
However, since 2005, the same institution has granted Desarrolladora La Ribera a concession of 142 thousand square meters for the construction and operation of the marina, a breakwater and a dock, and another concession for 68,319 square meters that overlaps with the fishermen’s concession.
The use granted for the company’s concession that overlaps with that of the fishermen is for exclusive use of protection, so only acts to maintain the concessioned surface in a natural state are permitted.
“Not authorizing the installation of any element, the realization of any construction, the realization of any activity or the provision of service of any kind,” stated the concession title.
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The fishermen denounced that Costa Palmas has not respected the use of the concession, since it has filled the area to avoid erosion and has placed tourist infrastructure, endorsed by the authorizations of Semarnat for the rehabilitation and stabilization of the beach.
In addition, they pointed out that there cannot be two Zofemat concessions in the same area, one in front of the other.
“The conditions under which a concession was granted to Costa Palmas, which is above the rights of the legitimate owners of the concession (in reference to the fishermen) and of users of a sector that has made historical use of the area, must be analyzed. In addition, Costa Palmas, being the owner of that portion of Zofemat, has also conditioned access to the area and it should not be like that,” said Gómez.
In 2016, representatives of Costa Palmas made an agreement with the fishermen of the Punta La Ribera Cooperative for the free use of the ramp in the marina, but the fishermen, at the expense of the agreement, fear that the conditions will change at any time.
In addition, the agreement does not take into account the fishermen of the other cooperatives and free fishermen, so fishermen like Minjares go out to fish from the only access left to the main beach or pay to use the marina. While others, not having a defined area, have left their lives at sea to join work, even in Costa Palmas.
“If we continue like this, the time will come when the practice of fishing will be forgotten. There are only a few of us. The issue of concessions and lands reclaimed from the sea by other companies has led us to bankruptcy as fishermen,” said Minjares.
The inhabitants of La Ribera have been deprived of places that they had historically and culturally used and the fishermen have been displaced from their workspace.
The loss of these environments also implies the violation of the right to a healthy environment, according to Gómez.
The fishermen of the community traveled to Mexico City to present their case at the central offices of Semarnat on January 16 but have not received a response. Meanwhile, Leal pointed out that the governor of Baja California Sur, Víctor Castro, has not responded to the fishermen’s requests for a meeting since April 2024.
“We are a town made up of fishermen forgotten by governments that always support development companies more than us,” said Minjares.
The lesson of La Ribera for Baja California Sur
Resolving the situation of concessions and lands reclaimed from the sea should be the priority for local and federal governments, according to the fishermen of La Ribera, to guarantee the future of this public space.
The fishermen, like Leal, are hopeful that the issue of concessions will be resolved in their favor since they see with optimism the actions of the new head of Semarnat, Alicia Bárcena, who has recently revoked environmental authorizations for projects near La Ribera, such as Baja Bay and La Abundancia in Cabo Pulmo.
The researchers consulted for this report do not know what the outcome will be of the impacts of the marina, the stabilization works and the diversion of the stream, because these are processes that happen almost imperceptibly over time. However, they are certain that the most effective way to protect La Ribera and Baja California Sur is to prevent this from happening again.
“Costa Palmas is an example of everything that should not be done in a coastal tourism project. It was a project that was not viable for the area in the way it was planned, so it has generated a host of environmental, economic and social impacts. What the authority has to do is (…) make an effective evaluation of the environmental viability of the projects and establish the best mitigation measures because it is impossible to completely repair the damage once it is done,” said Gómez.
Source: animalpolitico
