| | |  Travel & Outdoors | May 2009 
Palm Trees and Culture Sprout in Baja Oasis
 Lauren Viera - Chicago Tribune
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| | In this skinny sliver of Mexico, Todos Santos is an unexpected oasis of culture. (Baja California Sur Tourism Secretariat) | |
Todos Santos, B.C.S. - Happening upon a cluster of palm trees in the middle of the Mexican desert is something of a novelty.
After driving for kilometer after barren kilometer across the dusty terrain of Baja California Sur, void of any signs of people or plant life, Highway 19 suddenly rambles its way across the Tropic of Cancer and into a small town, where there are people, and there are a few desert-dwelling plants. And, refreshingly, there are palm trees. A whole grove of them, in fact.
Sprouting near them, as if they were dependent on one another, there is culture. And it's thriving.
Todos Santos is home to dozens of galleries and restaurants and little shops, seemingly displaced in the middle of the desert. There is music and nightlife; there are fliers tacked on stucco walls advertising a film festival taking place over the weekend and tattered posters left from an art festival a few weeks back. There are locals and tourists mixing and mingling at a lazy, relaxed pace, pausing to make pleasantries with each other and admire the historic streets and sites around them.
All this lies about an hour's drive northwest of Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur's premiere party town.
Needless to say, in this skinny sliver of Mexico, Todos Santos is an unexpected oasis of culture. Kind of like a palm tree in the middle of the desert.
TRICKLING IN
It all started with Jesus. Or sugar.
Like many Mexican villages during the mid-18th Century, Todos Santos was descended upon by Jesuits to convert the indigenous (at that time, the Pericú, Cochime and Guaycura ethnic groups living in the foothills of the region's Sierra de la Laguna Mountains) to Christianity and spread the holy word through a system of missions lining the Baja Peninsula.
Built in 1724 and named Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Todos Santos' mission still stands at the heart of the town. It was established to foster a farming community capitalizing on the area's surprisingly rich soil - in particular, its ability to grow sugarcane.
Within a handful of years, Todos Santos' burgeoning religion was overshadowed by its agriculture. That lush, desert-dwelling palm grove visible from the highway was sprung from an aquifer buried just south of town, discovered in the late 1800s and tapped for large-scale production of sugarcane.
For decades, Todos Santos' sugar industry thrived. A half-dozen mills were established, and the wealthy families who ran them built mansions and haciendas here. But by the 1950s, exhausted from overuse, the aquifer dried up, taking the town along with it. Poverty settled in, and Todos Santos began to resemble the desert surrounding it. Other than a handful of villagers, only the palm grove and the buildings remained.
And then, after 30-odd years of self-replenishment, the aquifer's water began flowing here once again. And with it, artists started trickling in. They flowed in from the north via the newly constructed Highway 19, whose two lanes were paved straight through the town in 1984.
Attracted to the sleepy village (and, likely, its impoverished state and cheap cost of living), artists began migrating. Studios, galleries and collectives were established. Commerce and tourists followed, almost in tandem with one another. An artists' colony was born.
COWBELLS AND CRICKETS
There are more than two dozen galleries in this small town of 4,500 residents - a significant number of whom are expatriates who came here as visitors and never left. There are painting and drawing studios; there are craftsmen and women specializing in ceramics and tile. There's a huge eponymous arts festival that's taken place here every February for the last 11 years.
Todos Santos' population surges during its Festival del Arte, and the little inns here get their fill. They run the gamut from historic and traditional to modern and stylish. Jenny Armit, a Londoner who settled in Todos Santos several years ago, runs the Hotelito on an unmarked dirt road in the hills behind town.
Armit, who manages the Hotelito on her own, converses in faintly British-accented Spanish to her staff and spends afternoons chasing her very disobedient dog, Benito, along the beach. The vibe of her lodging reflects her displaced Londoner-in-Mexico persona: Consisting of four tidy suites laid over a sand garden that's combed at dawn, the Hotelito wouldn't be out of place in Palm Springs. The linen thread counts are high and each suite comes with a private patio and hammock draped luxuriously in fragrant bougainvillea vines.
The isolated grounds are quiet save for the occasional tinkling of a cowbell from one of the neighboring farms, or faintly ringing bells from the mission in town, marking weekend services. In the evenings, the crickets join in to chorus with owls from the foothills.
LOSE TRACK OF TIME
Back in town and along the lagoon and palm grove, historic buildings have been converted into luxury vacation rentals to accommodate tourism here. Located on a quiet street off Benito Juárez, the half-mile main drag, Todos Santos Inn is housed in a hacienda, formerly home to a sugarcane baron in the mid-1800s, at the height of the sugar rush.
The courtyard's landscape shades a pool the size of a pond whose water is close to 26 C - the average daily temperature here. (There is rarely rainfall; it's usually the talk of the town when there is any.) A quaint wine bar sits on the south side of the hacienda, accessible from the street. Its hours are posted as 5-9 p.m., but realistically, it's open when there's a bartender on duty - and not when there's not.
So goes the pace of life here. Restaurants keep relatively predictable hours during peak tourist season (November through May, when temperatures are in the low to mid-20s as opposed to pushing 37), but if it's too hot and humid, business might be over for the day. I was nearly locked in the Casa de la Cultura when it unexpectedly closed an hour early during my Saturday afternoon visit. Its sole attendant apparently thought it was empty.
It's easy to lose track of time there.
The center and related museo are grouped together in a former elementary school whose concrete-floored classrooms are littered with random artifacts and documents.
Unidentified paintings hang crookedly next to unmarked, tattered black and white photographs above antique contraptions strewn on dusty bookshelves. Skulls and teeth of anonymous humans are haphazardly encased in ancient glass museum boxes void of any indication as to where they came from or why they were brought here. A few items are labeled; most are not.
In the courtyard, re-creations of historic dwellings sit adjacent to a long unused basketball hoop engulfed in bougainvillea. Roosters crow absently from somewhere in the yard, or in the building ... it's difficult to tell.
Some of this town's history is more recent. The Hotel California is situated on Benito Juárez around the corner from the mission, and a pan flute rendition of the Eagles' hit song is piped through the gift shop all day, every day. Word broke in the '80s that Don Henley and the Eagles' tune was inspired by a stay here, and the hotel capitalized on it, quickly becoming the town's top tourist attraction. Henley has since squelched the rumor.
Still, that song plays day in and day out. And after spending a Saturday night dodging Boomers Gone Wild sashaying around the outdoor patio with (very strong) margaritas in hand, you'd better pray you can check out any time you like - and leave.
Explore anywhere else in this oasis of a town, though, and you're going to want to stick around as long as that palm grove. |
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