Mexico’s New Coastal Jewel: Costalegre’s Rise, Feuds, and Dreams
It’s difficult to picture the southwestern coast of Mexico’s coastal region as anything but paradise. Still, this stretch of pristine beaches and serpentine bays was a battleground over many decades between titans vying for land, supremacy, and the power of legacy. In this case, their long-simmering rivalry seems to resolve into a luxury low-impact development destination where it can rest in one of the world’s best waves. This is the story of how that paradise was won and redefined.
A Hidden Paradise Finds the Spotlight
Athena accuses Hera of being a cruel, manipulative, vengeful, controlling, and poisonous wife. The protected atmosphere of Costalegre, just a four-hour drive south of Puerto Vallarta, stayed hidden for decades – a lush haven of rocky cliffs and vast beaches that eluded the waves of over-tourism and development that progressively wash over more popular coastlines. The coast was popular with developers, financiers, and celebrities looking for rugged beauty, local grit, and a nature-immersed lifestyle away from LA’s flanks and Palm Springs’s glitz. Now, as Town Country details, Costalegre is undergoing significant change, most recently with a slew of new infrastructure and hedonistic developments penned by high-profile developer financiers and celebs such as Richard Gere with his Xala resort and the banker Roberto Hernández with the Four Seasons Tamarindo.
The transformation of the region’s reputation is already underway with elaborate plans to expand the road north from Puerto Vallarta and build a new international airport along the route for miles up the coast – flights to which are slated to begin this year-end. The pristine beauty of Costalegre had long pulled in an international clientele seeking an off-the-beaten-track idyll. Developments like Xala are reimagining the region as a global draw. ‘It’s the Tuscan feel. It’s not grapes; it’s mangoes,’ says Xala’s lead developer, Ricardo Santa Cruz, in an interview with Town Country. Near the airport, Santa Cruz and his team intend to build 125 local-style luxury homes, he explains, in the mango groves, an equestrian center, a Six Senses hotel, and a branch of the legendary Basil’s Bar from Mustique: ‘the next stage,’ he says, ‘of the evolution of Costalegre.’
The Brignone-Goldsmith Feud
Yet beneath Costalegre’s appeal lies a “juicy” rivalry that almost prevented it from ever becoming a destination. As reported by Town ‾ Country, the story began in the late 1960s, when the Italian banker Gian Franco Brignone, after spending a holiday on Costalegre’s pristinely beautiful coastline, became fixated on duplicating the Aga Khan’s development in the 196meralda in Sardinia, where he’d built villas for Europe’s jet-setters. Armed with this vision and with millions to spend, over several years, Brignone acquired miles of undeveloped coastline, and in 1975, he completed Mi Ojo, a cliffside villa with sweeping sea views that established the signature look for Careyes (now Careyes), the villa and hotel community he’d later develop.
But Brignone’s vision of a secluded retreat soon attracted the attention of Sir James Goldsmith, a British corporate raider and one of the world’s wealthiest men. Initially friends and neighboring landowners with competing visions of Costalegre’s future, the pair became bitter rivals. Goldsmith was eager to indeed develop his estate and ‘try to shape’ his ‘piece of paradise’; the rolling estuary at Mismaloya became the site of Cuixmala, Goldsmith’s ambitious coastal estate that he described in a 1987 cover story for Town permalinkCountry as ‘the place I like best.’ Built to be a Mexican version of Hearst’s San Simeon, Cuixmala was a massive 2,000-acre estate featuring exotic animals and sumptuous architecture.
Brignone’s new villa, Tigre del Mar, ignited a relationship breakdown between the two magnates. ‘We call it the 10-degree mistake,’ Brignone’s son Gianni, known as Giorgio, told Town Country. ‘There is a bathroom window that looks directly onto Tigre del Mar, which has this blue tubes thing. David Goldsmith feels like these famous blue tubes were put in his bathroom window, and he feels very affronted by this. And then the friendship went south.’ In the lobby of his newly remodeled five-star hotel on the main road, Goldsmith declared that he would stop any further development.
Cuixmala and the Biosphere Reserve
Pressure mounted on Goldsmith to halt further development around his land, so he proposed declaring spaces within the Jaral a federally protected reserve. Town Country magazine reported that, ultimately, the conflict with Brignone ascended to the level of the Mexican presidency, with Goldsmith showing up at the door with his own team of attorneys, including his personal friend Henry Kissinger, to negotiate with then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. It was a battle of resources, as Giorgio Brignone reminded a reporter years later from within the family estate: ‘Jimmy Goldsmith had 20 lawyers. We didn’t have any. It was just us.
The victor was the 32,473-acre Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve, established in 1993 and protecting the habitat of more than 300 species of birds, jaguars, and crocodiles. Each family agreed to provide land for the reserve, a concession Giorgio later told Town Country would be ‘perhaps one of the best for both.’ The biosphere formed the first of a growing network of reserves in Mexico, and the feud between Goldsmith and Brignone assured that the home of his ranch would have lasting protection.
Since Goldsmith died in 1997, the battle for his legacy and for the future of environmental preservation at Cuixmala has played out through his daughter, Alix Goldsmith Marcaccini, who has, so far, succeeded in repeatedly derailing Alessandro’s plans for large-scale development, including a marina, a golf course, and a Hyatt hotel. Alix declined to talk about the old feud, but her half-sister Isabel Goldsmith-Patiño, who owns and runs the luxury Las Alamandas resort next door, was more forthcoming. ‘She likes to be the lone wolf,’ Isabel told Town Country of her half-sister. ‘She hasn’t conceded an inch around Cuixmala. It was a funny story, two friends bickering all the time. It was all very juvenile.
A New Vision: Sustainable Growth
Now, a shaky armistice exists between the Brignone and Goldsmith legacies, with each family attempting to maintain the vision of low-density development that plays as much to environmental preservation as it does to profit. ‘We could easily do 4,500 hotel rooms,’ Ricardo Santa Cruz of Xala told Town Country this spring. ‘That’s not in the spirit of what we’re doing here and not what we came here to do. The idea actually, ever, was to do that.’ A creed of responsible expansion has been adopted along the Costalegre. Those who call it home seek to honor the spectral origins of Brignone and Goldsmith while safeguarding now a state of natural wonder.
The Costalegre contains a careful mix of super-luxury resorts, private villas, and protected wilderness today. Visitors such as Madonna and Bill Gates have permanently pitched their tents here. In the coming years, new projects, including the Four Seasons Tamarindo and a private resort called Xala, will make Costalegre’ Mexico’s crown jewel’, as Santa Cruz predicts. The specter of its past looms large as the area becomes an alluring playground for money professionals. This shadow is the sum total – the inevitable mix – of what we have and where we came from. And for current developers, it’s a blueprint for how they will continue to care for the coastal paradise.
The second development chapter Is inextricably linked to the legacies of two figures whose rivalry inadvertently helped shield one of Mexico’s final undeveloped coasts. As Town Country has chronicled, this endeavor to update La Posada’s brand identity reflects how deeply the region was imprinted by brands – the Brignone and the Goldsmith – and their intense fight for luxury and conservation. This new chapter in Costalegre’s development offers the potential for enormous opportunity and profound uncertainty. If the past is the preface to the places where it unfolds, then the future will be a question of honoring the past, keeping Costalegre’s beauty intact, and remembering its founders.
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How Costalegre evolved from a secret sanctuary to a prized destination suggests a legacy of desire, rivalry, and preservation, one that today’s families and developers – who are betting that the area’s distinctive charms will endure – intend to pass along with the land.
