Almost half a century ago, my grandmother, already very old, spoke with amazement of a new city north of Mazatlán, but there was no such; in reality it was not more than the first popular colony that was being added to the Mazatlán that she knew.
However, now we would be right if we said the same as my grandmother, since current Mazatlán is made up of two very different cities: the Historic Center, contained between the Cathedral, the Angela Peralta theater and the Paseo de Olas Altas, and, separately for five kilometers of beaches and boardwalk, the new tourist city of the great towers, condominiums, marinas and golf course. They are so different that some tourists, after a week of timeshare, return to their land without knowing the happy nineteenth-century atmosphere of old Mazatlán.
I call "old" and not "old" to the Mazatlán of the Historic Center because this last word automatically invokes the pre-Hispanic or the colonial. Mazatlán has none of that. There were no indigenous or colonial settlements simply because there was no drinking water on this sporadic peninsula called in Nahuatl "Venados Place. Its identification as a human settlement more or less coincided with Independence, between 1810 and 1821. The commercial boom that later earned it its fame as "the Northwest Warehouse" did not begin until the 1930s, with the arrival of the first European merchants, mostly German. The Spanish arrived in the 1940s, after Mexico and Spain made peace in 1839.
From that moment the great commercial marine activity of Mazatlán began, first only with Europe and the Philippine Islands, but in the last third of the century, mainly with San Francisco. At that time the great constructions of the Historic Center were made and the tropical neoclassical style that characterizes our architecture was defined, a neoclassical less stretched out than that of the inland cities and more open to air and joy.
For its part, the new city, known as the "Golden Zone", is the daughter of the Second World War and the frenzied growth experienced by international tourism thanks to aeronautical advances and the prosperity generated by the new technological industries developed by the needs warlike.
The immediate result was the creation and proliferation of exclusively tourist hotels and, preferably, on the seashore. Thus began the Hotel Playa, which was the first, on Las Gaviotas beach, six kilometers from where the old Mazatlán ended then. That hotel continues to thrive along with the multitude of more recent emulators, as well as exclusive residential subdivisions that attract not only foreigners but also Mazatlecos seeking the comforts and security of modern developments.
This growth, however, at one point threatened old Mazatlán with death. First slowly, then violently, it emptied it of population and services such as cinemas, clinics and legal offices, leaving only the old part of the city. By 1970, what is now the Historic Center had become a disaster zone, with entire blocks abandoned. In 1975, Cyclone Olivia tore the roof off the Angela Peralta Theater, which was soon turned into a jungle dominated by a gigantic ficus in the forum.
That's how polarized Mazatlán was when a group of Sinaloa enthusiasts began rebuilding the Historic Center to make it what it is today: an irresistible attraction for tourists who crowd the theater and restaurants in the area. That is why the unquestionable uniqueness of Mazatlán consists in being the only beach destination in all of Mexico that has a Historic Center with a life of its own and has continued since its foundation. This count.
Pulmonias: a peculiar transport
Formerly and until a few years ago, in Mazatlán calenders pulled by draft animals were used to transport passengers; these have now been replaced by the cute pneumonia, which are small cars open on the sides.
Source: Tips from Aeroméxico No. 15 Sinaloa / spring 2000
