Mexico’s Islas Marias: from prison to tourist attraction
D
espite its serene setting, Spike Island in Cork harbor, Ireland, was once a place no man would choose to visit. Indeed, the island’s dark past as a Victorian prison is part of the reason it attracts visitors today.
Spike Island
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One of Mexico’s most notorious prisons begins a new chapter this weekend as a Pacific Ocean getaway after a makeover aimed at bringing in tourists to the former penal colony.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Friday evening opened the Islas Marias Tourist Center, bidding to turn the decades-old federal prison in the Islas Marias archipelago into an environmental attraction and place for history lovers.
“This is tourism for excursions, to explore, to live with nature,” Lopez Obrador said this week. “To recreate history, it’s something exceptional, extraordinary.”
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Alongside villas to lodge guests, a restaurant, a cafe and beaches, the revamped site includes an arch named after Nelson Mandela, who spent some 18 years behind bars on South Africa’s Robben Island before being elected president of the country.
Mandela is “an example that even behind prison walls, ideals and change can live on for those who want to change history,” Mexico’s government said in a promotional video.
The exterior of the new Islas Marias cultural center.
Raquel Cunha/Reuters
Located about 62 miles off the western state of Nayarit, the Islas Marias became a prison in 1905 under dictator Porfirio Diaz and was in almost constant use until it was closed by Lopez Obrador in 2019.
The penitentiary once housed many political prisoners, including Jose Revueltas, an influential Mexican writer imprisoned several times for his left-wing activism.