Bacocho – Puerto’s Oldest Housing Development
BEFORE I’D EVER BEEN TO BACOCHO I KNEW I WOULDN’T want to live there. The assumption that just because I was a gringa I would naturally live in a gringo ghetto was insulting to me. For a year, while I looked for a property to build on, I refused to see anything in the neighborhood. Of course, I wound up living in Bacocho.
Bacocho is not picturesque, it’s not typical Puerto, and it could be a middle-class neighborhood anywhere in Mexico or even southern California. But neither is it a gringo enclave of wintertime residents. In my part of Bacocho, at least, there are as many singlestory row houses as there are two-story ones with roof-top palapas. My neighbors are Mexicans; they work here, and they send their kids to the nearby private school.
Developed by Fonatur (Fondo Nacional de Fomento al Turismo) in 1975, Bacocho is the oldest fraccionamiento (residential subdivision) in Puerto. A fraccionamiento, as opposed to a colonia, is a planned residential community where streets are paved and utility lines installed before lots are sold. At the time, it was a major preattraction for local residents who had never seen paved streets before. Now these same streets are full of potholes, and the electricity and water are not always reliable.
The 54-hectare, subdivision has over 700 lots, each measuring around 10 x 30 meters. The first buyers were investors from Mexico City and Oaxaca who were in no hurry to build. Only around 200 lots were sold between 1975 and 1980. A lot in 1980 cost the peso equivalent of $7,500 US.
Fonatur responded by constructing 24 two and three-bedroom houses, some of which are still occupied by their original owners. These houses are real gems that have withstood over 40 years of earthquakes and hurricanes with nary a scratch. All the rooms have hardwood closets and cabinets. Where the two sides of the V-shaped tiled roof meet there is a vent that allows air, but not rain, to enter. But these houses were not cheap. In 1984, a new, 3-bedroom house, on a 312 square-meter lot, cost the peso equivalent of $42,000 U.S. Now houses go for 10 times as much, if you can find one that is for sale.
When I bought my lot and built my house in 2007, there were still almost as many vacant lots as there were houses. All that has changed in the last few years. Now there are apartment complexes in the commercial zone, and houses being built as Airbnbs.
Bacocho was designed to attract the professional people – doctors, lawyers, business owners, etc. – who were needed to make Puerto succeed as a “tourist platform”. The original plan included a shopping mall on calle Guelatao. It was not meant to accommodate tourists, outside of the hotel zone. But Americans and Canadians were early buyers and renters. Puerto Escondido had a population of 3,428 in 1970. It grew to 8,194 in 1990.
Round-abouts (retornos) built around small parks are a signature feature of Bacocho. There are eight Retornos, but they are numbered from 1 to 17. House numbers are totally random. You get to choose your own, regardless of your neighbor’s. When I registered my building plans with the municipality, I asked what my street number was. Whatever you want it to be, I was told. According to the title, my property is Lot 1 of Block 2 of Super Block 1. This is not to be confused with my mailing address and what’s on street signs. All the streets, except for the Retornos, are named for municipalities in the state of Oaxaca like Salina Cruz and Tlacochahuaya. In the adjacent community of Rinconada the streets are named for fish.
History: In the late 1960s, the federal government, with the help of loans from the World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank, decided to invest heavily in international tourism. By the end of 1968, the Bank of Mexico came up with six undeveloped beaches for possible tourist destinations, which were then narrowed down to three: Cancún, Ixtapa, and Puerto Escondido. (The other three were Los Cabos and Loreto, in Baja California, and Huatulco.) So it was that on July 21, 1970, president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz expropriated 1,329 hectares of San Pedro Mixtepec.
Fonatur started developing Puerto in 1975, but it pulled out in 1982 when it was unable to resolve the claims of Santa Maria Colotepec to part of the expropriated land. During its brief stay, Fonatur gave us, among other gifts, an international airport (completed in 1985) and Bacocho (Bahías de la Costa Chica de Oaxaca).
