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Mazatlán´s Centro Historico, the original heart of the city, has the rich
history of a port town which grew from an outpost village into a bustling
city during some of the most turbulent and prosperous years in Mexican history.
It was occupied by the Spanish, the US Navy, the British and the French.
It harbored pirates, frontiersmen, revolutionaries, drifters, artists and
writers, and attracted entrepreneurs who made fortunes in the mining, fishing
and agricultural industries. From its humble beginnings in the mid 17th
Century, the Centro Historico has today been resurrected from neglect into
an almost gentrified community of treed plazas, restaurants, art galleries,
and stunningly restored homes painted in soft pastels. With the revival
of the Centro Historico have come tourists looking for alternative accommodation
to the splash and glitz of Golden Zone mega-hotels. To cater to these tourists,
several pleasant Bed & Breakfasts opened their doors, and the abandoned
Freeman Hotel on Olas Altas bay with an unsurpassed ocean view was gutted
and completely remodeled into a modern four star hotel, with comparable
room rates. While the refurbished Freeman Hotel anchors the south end of
Olas Altas bay, the smaller, older hotels to the north have found their
niche in appealing to tourists and backpackers on a budget. Into this category
falls the legendary Belmar Hotel. To the casual observer the pink and white
exterior of the Belmar looks indistinguishable from the surrounding older,
and somewhat shabby, buildings. But a walk through its open arch, along
the cave-like passageway, passed the wood and leather Concordia rocking
chairs to the darkly carved ebony reception desk is a step into its fascinating
and somewhat elusive history. According to municipal records, the Belmar
was built by Louis Leonard Bradbury, an American entrepreneur who was born
in Bangor, Maine in 1823. He was, records state, the main shareholder of
a gold and silver mining company in El Rosario, Sinaloa, the proceeds of
which made him a millionaire. American records show that in 1868 he married
the beautiful Simona Martinez of a prominent Mazatlecan family and together
they had six children. Bradbury passed away in July, 1892 at his ranch in
California, followed by his wife ten years later. And there the recorded
history of the founder of the Belmar Hotel ends. But it is not the end of
the story. It is just the beginning. And where recorded history fails us,
oral history takes over. Legend has it that Bradbury never intended to build
an hotel. He purchased a piece of property which had once been |
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a travellers´
inn, the courtyard of which was for hobbling horses at the drinking trough.
His idea was to build an office, home and a few rooms for friends to stay
when they came to town. However, as the town grew in prosperity, more friends
visited and he was constantly asked by complete strangers if he had a room
to rent. Eventually he added another two floors to accommodate them. Some
say Bradbury´s original wooden building was destroyed during a hurricane,
to be rebuilt with concrete and rebar. Bradbury, they say, was a prudent
man and given the turbulent times he built a tunnel beneath the structure
which exits on what is now the malecón of Olas Altas. It was an escape route
from revolutionaries, or the army, and legend has it he hid gold in both
the tunnel and the entrance columns as a hedge against robbery. Many years
later the now watery tunnel became infested with rats, and to counteract
the problem the then owners introduced boa constrictor snakes. One story
has it that a chef in the kitchen was leaning over his stove stirring a
pot when he felt something on his shoulder – it was a boa checking out the
stew! By the prosperous 1920s, long after Bradbury had died, the Belmar
under unknown owners, became the social center of the town. With lush gardens,
exquisite cuisine and grand ballrooms, it was the natural locale for Carnaval
festivities. And the perfect place for a murder. It was the Carnaval of
1944. The doors of the Belmar´s five ballrooms were thrown open for Carnaval
revelers. In the Salon Palmas then Governor of Sinaloa, Rodolfo T. Loaiza,
was seated at the head table beside Carnaval Queen, Lucila Medrano. Hidden
in the folds of the heavy window curtains was Rodolfo Valdés, aka “The Gypsy.”
Valdés shot the Governor. The governor slumped dead onto the white shoulder
of Senorita Medrano. The Gypsy fled but was caught by police and put in
the now destroyed jail located at the present day Mirador. Eventually, he
was sent to prison in Culiacán and died of a heart attack while in custody.
From the early 1920s on, Mazatlán began attracting attention as a tourist
destination. Famous photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Muybridge took
up residence in the Belmar, and later in the 1950s the lure of deepsea fishing
brought Hollywood illuminaries such as Anaïs Nin, John Barrymore, John Wayne,
Gregory Peck, Yul Bryner and Tyrone Power to the city. Those were indeed
the heydays of the Belmar Hotel. Time, though, and the gradual shift of
tourism to new hotels and amenities in the Golden Zone drew tourists away
from the Belmar Hotel. However, not all the guests left….. (Next month;
Part II – Ghostly Legends of the Belmar) |
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