Travel
The Last Resort
The beautiful people may be gone, but the setting endures—which is why Acapulco is the same wildly romantic place it has always been.
ACAPULCO HAS ALWAYS STRUGGLED with its reputation. “Dreadful hotels and all sorts of totally unacceptable people,” a member of the jet set tsked to the New York Times in 1966, and so it remains, more than thirty years later. “There’s a phalanx of skyscrapers on the beach and behind it a lot of misery,” a former hotel executive told me recently. The high-rise hotels lining the once-pristine bay; the traffic jams and American fast-food chains clogging the Costera Alemán, the city’s main drag; the presence of very pale, very unglamorous people traveling on package tours—these are among the myriad objections trotted out by those who remember Acapulco’s allegedly unspoiled days of the forties, fifties, sixties, and/or seventies. There’s an exaggerated quality to all this grieving, as if what has replaced the old Acapulco is something grossly inferior, not worth a second, much less a first, look. That couldn’t be further from the truth: Acapulco has moved from a glitzy adolescence into a feisty middle age; it’s no less sensual than before but now has a knowing sense of humor about itself too.
“Acapulco has lots of different flavors,” says local realtor Marianne Rivas, a Dallas native who has lived there for more than three decades. “Those other places are just government cookie cutters.” Indeed, if you dislike the sanitized version of Mexico offered at all those government-developed resorts, if you don’t care about hobnobbing with the most beautiful people, if your preference is for funkiness and faded glamour (do you miss the old Miami? the old Vegas?), you should know that Acapulco beckons as it always has, decade after decade after, well, decade. “I would do anything for Acapulco,” Rivas says dreamily, and it isn’t hard to see why.
There is a spectacular point high above the city from which it is possible to see the teeming, high rise—lined bay to the north, the serene blue waters of Puerto Marqués to the east, and to the south, behind another small mountain, the pounding waves of the Pacific. Outlined by the perilous cliffs and intractable vegetation, the vista provides the seminal explanation for Acapulco’s appeal: No matter how much progress encroaches, the city’s physical setting prevails, allowing Acapulco to remain the same wildly romantic place it has always been.
That past is often misunderstood. The old-timers who remember Acapulco as a quiet fishing village have conveniently forgotten that the place was, from the beginning, a port, with all the accompanying drama and exoticism. Isolated from the rest of Mexico by the lack of roads, Acapulco grew up a place apart, seductive, deceptive—the “colonial” church on the zócalo was actually built as a movie set in 1930—shaped by those who could get here, an adventurous assortment of mobsters, royals, movie stars, corporate types, and Texas fat cats eager to try on new identities and, of course, one another. “No one knew who anybody was” is the frequent, wistful description of the old days, when sex wasn’t so lethal, drinking wasn’t so bad, and money didn’t count for everything. It is to Acapulco’s credit that that feeling can still be captured—or recaptured—in a long weekend, just a short and economical plane ride from most major Texas cities.
To relive Acapulco’s glory days, it’s best to break the bank—start at $250 a night (prices include 17 percent tax) and keep going—and give in to the charms of Las Brisas (800-228-3000). (Its chief competitor, the Villa Vera, created by the famously randy bandleader turned hotel manager Teddy Stauffer, has fallen on hard times but was recently purchased for renovation.) Located between the airport and the center of town, Las Brisas winds its way up a jagged hillside, its famous casitas, each with its own microscopic swimming pool, cantilevered one above another. As was true when it opened in the early sixties, the hotel still prides itself on providing guests with nothing less than a private world. The Do Not Disturb signs are large, hand-painted, and posted on the patios, not the doors, of the cottages; hibiscus magically bloom on the surface of the swimming pools daily; extraterrestrially courteous drivers appear out of thin air to chauffeur guests around the place in those famous pink-and-white Jeeps named after sixties icons—Goldie Hawn, Ernest Borgnine, Buzz Aldrin. Best of all, that breakfast of gently warmed breads, just-picked fruit, and pungent Mexican coffee is still left discreetly in the warming box in the casita’s wall until you’re ready for it. Having it your way is, after all, the point of Las Brisas: Exploring the steep, winding roads of the resort early one morning, I passed the patio of an Asian couple who lay asleep on their lawn chaises, fully clothed underneath their beach towels, as if they had bunked there for the night. Farther on, I ambled by a gay couple in the same position, sunning themselves in the nude. Though the self-contained casitas provide ample privacy—thick hedges, patterned brick walls—it’s never quite as much as guests quickly come to imagine.
Those who do not wish to devote their entire time at Las Brisas to the world within their casita should not miss the opportunity to visit La Concha, the hotel’s beach club at the base of the hill. I say this not just because the beach club is lovely, with three pools (two regular and one salt water) and a bayside restaurant under a giant palapa (the swim-up bar, it should be remembered, was invented in Acapulco), but also because the Jeep ride to La Concha allows hotel guests a peak at the private homes located within the separate housing development also known as Las Brisas. (These can be rented from Marianne Rivas, 011-52-74-84-34-24, and other brokers starting at around $410 a week in the off-season—the rich are nothing if not diligent when it comes to maximizing their real estate investments.) This brief tour—introduced by uniformed guards at the gated entry—is not to be missed. These embassy-size houses with their competitively manicured gardens evoke Mexico less than certain exclusive neighborhoods in or near Los Angeles and have sheltered the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Elizabeth Taylor, Halston, and various Texans, including Lyndon and Lady Bird and assorted Mecoms and Murchisons. Las Brisas is a reminder that geography has never been a problem for the wealthy: They all belong to the same club, after all.
If economics makes Las Brisas impossible, a charming new guest house, Casa Cebra, recently opened in the old Caleta neighborhood, north of the zócalo, providing a reasonable facsimile of Acapulco’s heyday at a fraction of the cost ($117 a night and up for a double room; 011-52-74-83-00-91). A restored circa-1950 house, Casa Cebra offers a blending of fifties style and nineties convenience in the walled, winding part of town that was once a Rat Pack hangout. There is the requisite pool, spectacular views, and privacy on demand, along with field trips to mud baths at Polita’s Jungle Restaurant, which also features homemade mescal. Instead of Teddy Stauffer as host, Casa Cebra has two cheerful and deeply tanned hairdressers who cashed out in Chicago, a difference that, given the passing of the decades, comes out about the same.
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