Mayakoba: "Sensational and Singular"

Excellence is rare enough. Excellence that is also original and forward thinking is very rare. Thanks to the vision and persistence of one man and the gifted designers, engineers, biologists, hoteliers and business people he inspired, Mayakoba falls into the very rare category.

Mayakoba began with a few unlikely twists of fate. OHL acquired its first piece of land on the Riviera Maya in the late 1980s. At the time, OHL was purely a construction company, and the coastline south of Cancun was undeveloped. During the 90s, OHL began diversifying its operations just as the sleepy fishing village of Playa del Carmen and the area around it came alive as a tourist destination. Still, OHL was not interested in developing their land. In 1997, they ordered Salvador Linares, their General Manager, New Developments, ?Go to the site, and find a buyer.? To his surprise, Linares took one look at the blue of the sky and the sea and the green depths of the mangrove forest, and fell in love. ?I can make something sensational and singular here,? he insisted to OHL?s president. He must have been persuasive, because the president gave him one year and one-and-a-half million dollars to demonstrate what that might be.

What could be done with 240 square hectares of mangrove forest and jungle that had a relatively short coastline of 1.6 kilometers? Because he admired his resorts and hotels on the Pacific coast, Linares hired the Mexican architect Mario Lazo to design the Master Plan of the site. With about a dozen members, including engineers, architects, biologists, hydrologists and tourism marketing experts, the design team camped out on the land for two weeks, walking, getting acquainted with the flora and fauna, thinking of possibilities. To complicate things further, the Mexican government imposed an increasingly heavy list of restrictions when it came to mangrove preservation.

The old way, as seen at Cancun, would have been to build a wall of 22-storey hotels on the beach. That was impossible, both because of government controls and the team?s ?green? design philosophy: ?Let the site be what it wants. Nature knows, and you can?t negotiate with that.? Instead of struggling with Nature, they redefined the space as well as the definition of a Caribbean resort. Rather than a thin strip of intensive development on the beach, they would introduce a number of hotel lots of 10 to 15 hectares each throughout the site. They would open up the jungle to let the Caribbean breeze waft through the land, and thread through it a golf course that would exploit the various landscapes of forest, jungle and beach. Each hotel?s connection to the sea would be through a beach club. It was a brilliant solution that used the whole space rather than a tiny fraction, enlivened and animated the usually ?dead? zone behind the beach, and preserved the dunes, the mangroves and the coral reefs for future generations.

The designers? redefinition of the resort raised another problem. How would visitors make their way through this rich and constantly changing landscape? The answer, again, came from Nature. The Yucatan has no surface rivers, but a vast network of pure, underground water lies close to its limestone surface. Using that water and sculpting a series of lagoons and canals through the site would enable visitors to travel from golf course to spa to hotel to beach via a fleet of small electric boats, or lanchas. ?Liberating? the Yucatan?s waters and bringing them to the surface was an original idea that would give visitors an even fuller experience of Nature. As well, for visitors who want to walk, bicycle or drive golf carts, there would be quiet, narrow trails that sacrificed a minimum of trees.

The ideas were aggressive and revolutionary, but Linares immediately recognized the sense behind them. At the year deadline, the Master Plan was presented and won the Authorities approval four days after. Not everyone had the imagination to understand his vision, and Linares loves to tell the story of the potential backers who told him he was ?a dreamer? to build a system of waterways for a Caribbean resort that wasn?t completely on the beach. One told him, ?When you?re finished building Disneyland, call me!?

The design team had crafted a resort that offered much more diversity than usual, and Linares added to that with his novel idea of a ?community of luxury brands? ? the fact that six subtly different, high-end hotels share the space and multiply the visitor?s options. At Mayakoba, it?s possible to select treatments from six spas, to bar-hop before choosing from more than a dozen dinner possibilities, to compare beach clubs.

These days, with Mayakoba?s opening not far in the future, the dreamers and visionaries who saw its unusual potential are more than content. Everyone is justifiably proud of the way Mayakoba respects and guards its dunes, jungle and mangroves. Because they listened to Nature, they have made a rare and diverse experience for visitors. Linares, who fell in love with the space eight years ago and never budged from his conviction that it could be something ?sensational and singular,? has proved his point.

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