The oasis in the town of Todos Santos in northwestern Mexico is a highly valued space for the local community. However, for the past five years, it has been deteriorating rapidly due to the tourism and agricultural real estate sector. In its defense, the community proposes creating a public park.
From the upper part of the town, a shallow area filled with palm trees and some vegetable gardens can be seen parallel to a body of water that flows into La Poza, a coastal lagoon. The Todos Santos residents call the landscape El Valle del Pilar (The Valley of the Pillar), in honor of the Virgin of Pilar, the town’s patron saint, and also El Palmar, recently designated an oasis by academia.
Baja California Sur is the most arid state in Mexico and the only one with oases, which represent less than 1% of the state’s total surface area. Oases are ecological systems composed of a body of water and areas of vegetation established in arid areas created to facilitate agriculture in the desert.
“The oasis enabled regional sustainability in an environment of water scarcity and has a very important social factor, comprised of traditional entities and practitioners who were responsible for equitably distributing resources to ensure the well-being of all in an environment characterized by isolation and aridity,” said Teresa Egea, sustainability advisor and landscaper.
The Todos Santos oasis is one of the most important wetlands in the state, but according to a study by the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur (UABCS) published in 2020, it is deteriorating due to tourism, agriculture, and extreme natural events.
“The Southern Californian oasis archipelago is interconnected. It is a system throughout the entire Baja California peninsula. The Todos Santos oasis is the second-highest agrobiodiversity of all the archipelagos. Furthermore, it is the most eroded oasis and most endangered,” said Egea.
The study, using satellite images, showed that the oasis’s area decreased by 51.2% in 17 years (from 2002 to 2019), while La Poza Lagoon decreased by 63% and the natural landscape by 21.7%.
During that same period, agricultural land use increased by 86.59% and urban land use by 43.57%, as seen in the comparative map. As urban growth increases, the oasis’s vegetation cover decreases and the area of La Poza shrinks.
As a sustainability consultant, Egea moved to Todos Santos in 2017. She studied the oasis and integrated it into the designs for which she was hired. However, developers didn’t understand the oasis’s importance and, instead of preserving it, sought to erase it with their projects.
“I’m tired of having to deal with consulting and proposals from developers and foreigners who hire me with goals of integration and community engagement, but who don’t understand my advice because they aren’t integrated and because their priorities really lie elsewhere. They have this tendency to come and erase all history and segregate the local population, who are increasingly displaced from privileged and historic locations to places without resources,” Egea said.
Based on her expertise, she decided to launch a solution: a land use plan that puts cultural identity, historical memory, and natural resources at the center, embodied in the Las Veredas del Agua project.
The project proposes conserving the 5.2 square kilometer oasis area and rehabilitating it as a public park. It includes an eco-path that runs through it and reconnects key elements of the territory to encourage people to once again walk the oasis’s water paths.
“Walking through the territory, the population regains awareness of the place, which is key to understanding its history and culture. Connections are created between the different local communities that are largely disconnected,” Egea noted.
The project considers it crucial to create a public market where produce from local gardens can be sold, to foster a transition from industrial agriculture to traditional agriculture with local value.
The idea of creating a public park in the oasis had been on the minds of the population for some time, but Egea substantiated it through interviews and research. She created a first conceptual proposal that received an honorable mention in the territorial planning category at the 2024 Latin American Biennial of Landscape Architecture.
Currently, the project is in the phase of building local alliances to create the technical design of the project in a participatory manner.
“The ideal is to create local governance with all sectors. Civil society designs, businesses provide financial support, academia guides the process, and the government approves. It can’t be done without one of these actors,” Egea said.
In partnership with the organization Proteger Todos Santos, the project will be presented to the community at a public event on June 20 and 21, where they can participate in its design through roundtable discussions.
Proposals such as the public park have gained relevance among the resident population after two mega tourism and real estate projects near and within the oasis were announced: The Palmoral by Santa Terra and Cabo Santos, which the community has opposed through demonstrations and petitions.
Urban growth, and particularly these types of projects, compromise the aquifer that supplies the resident community and the oasis, said Diego Ramírez, director of Proteger Todos Santos.
“The problem with the increasing population density is precisely that the water extracted for domestic, commercial, and agricultural supplies is taken from the Todos Santos aquifer, and that aquifer is precisely where the oasis is located. Its deterioration is largely due to the piping of water. Many of the trees are beginning to dry out because they no longer receive water, which now goes through a pipe,” Ramírez noted.
The UABCS study defined the Todos Santos Oasis aquifer as overexploited due to a decrease in water levels and increased salinity near the coast.
Previously, the springs ran continuously throughout the year, but since 2007, the flow has been limited for most of the year, except during short periods of tropical cyclones, the UABCS study notes.
For Ramírez, urban growth for high-density projects has transformed what was a historic landscape, created for food production, into a privileged location used for real estate speculation.
This is reflected, for example, in the town’s Subregional Urban Development Program, which in its latest update changed the area from palm groves and orchards to landscape development.
“The word implies many things because it now has a connotation more focused on tourism, unlike palm groves and orchards, which were defined as food production. So it also loses its essence and now becomes a concept more symbolically tied to tourism development,” Ramírez noted.
Previously, Todos Anteños came to the oasis to swim, wash clothes, play, and celebrate, so it had a high social value that has been lost. Currently, most of the orchards have been lost, and little by little, private property has closed off access to the stream that runs through the oasis.
“The park would be a way to reuse those spaces, and also a way to protect them, because they would no longer be abandoned,” Ramírez said.
When the Jesuits arrived in Baja California Sur, they changed the landscape by creating these oases around the missions, but this meant the displacement and extinction of the indigenous peoples. Ramírez fears that if the landscape, which has allowed survival for so long in an arid region, is changed again, this time it will mean the extinction of traditional knowledge and cultural heritage.
“We have very little time left with the imminent threats of development. They want to turn this biological and socio-environmental corridor that constitutes the oasis into a tourist corridor. This moment is key to avoid seeing a World Heritage site transformed before our eyes into a tourist corridor where the oasis will gradually disappear completely,” Egea said.
Source: es-us.noticias.yahoo
