A FALTERING MARINA VALLARTA
By John Youden

Ever since I moved to Puerto Vallarta in 1988 I have lived within Marina Vallarta. My first apartment was in Puesta del Sol – Club de Tenis and at that time it was the only building in the development. I had to walk down a muddy road to get to it, as the bricks were still being installed. The marina Malecon was still under construction and there were just a couple docks and boat slips. There was nothing along the beach, allowing me to take my yellow dune buggy, jumping the dunes and dodging incoming waves from where is now Bay View Grand all the way down to the Westin Regina. I don’t think I’d get away with that today.

It was the construction of Puesta del Sol by Guillermo Wulff that really allowed the marina to take off. His marketing plan involved offering Elizabeth Taylor (a friend of his from the Night of the Iguana days) a free penthouse condominium if she bought a second one. She went for it and came down with George Hamilton to sign the papers. A picture of the signing was placed in the sales room for the project and helped sales for the project take off. If it’s good enough for Liz, it should be good enough for you! It also helped Marina Vallarta to begin selling. Up to then Guillermo was the only one who was willing to take a chance in this new development outside of town. Other developers saw how fast Ing. Wulff was selling so they decided to get into the game and pretty soon there was construction happening throughout Marina Vallarta – in the marina, on the beach, and on the golf course.

And the result, overall, is good. Marina Vallarta is one of the finest marinas in all of Mexico, perhaps all of Latin America. It was fortunate to be mostly developed before Grupo Situr, the developers, started having financial problems. Other destinations were not so lucky, such as Mazatlan and Ixtapa, which ended up with marinas that today are half-finished and half-empty. However Situr’s misfortunate has come back to affect Marina Vallarta. While the assets of the company are being sold off by a consortium of banks from around the world, it has left the outcome of the marina in limbo. Money collected for maintenance fees has not been going back into the marina, and slowly the docks and services are deteriorating. What was once the darling of the Pacific Coast of Mexico has become a place that boaters would rather avoid, and are taking their boats elsewhere, if they can, to new and much better operations such as the marina at Paradise Village in Nuevo Vallarta. It lies across the marina entrance from another marina of Situr’s that is actually in much worse condition.

However these slips were not sold to boaters, as were the slips in Marina Vallarta, under a 20-year concession plan. Which leads to another set of questions: What is going to happen to these slips when the concession has expired? Eager Situr salespeople told clients that it would just be rolled over for a nominal fee, but of course that is not in writing. Will these slip owners get to retain their slips, or will the whole concession, involving approximately 500 slips, be up for grabs to outside marina administrators? And if that is so, will some money finally be put back into the marina so it looks at good as it did ten years ago?

Grupo Sidek/Situr was given five years to sell off all their assets and that deadline is still a couple of years away. The concession itself has another five years on top of that. So it looks like, short term, there will not be any changes to the standards of Marina Vallarta.

For that we need to know the final fate of Situr, and how the government will handle the upcoming concession renewalsy, for what is one of the finest marinas in Mexico.

Until then Marina Vallarta will most likely continue its slow decline in quality, unfortunate for us all.