The Hotel Casino de la Selva (Jungle Casino Hotel) was a hotel and casino located in the city of Cuernavaca, Mexico. The main building was opened in 1931 as a hotel and casino, but from 1934 it was used only as a hotel. Additions in the late 1950s included buildings designed by the architect Félix Candela that were roofed by reinforced concrete paraboloid shells. The interior was decorated with murals by well-known Mexican and Spanish artists. After the 1970s the hotel went into decline, and in 1994 was sold to a hotel chain that failed to pay taxes on the property. It was seized by the Mexican government and was auctioned off in 2001 as a site for construction of a discount store and a hypermarket. After demolition had begun there was a public outcry, and eventually some parts of the murals were preserved.
History Initial construction (1931)
Cuernavaca in the early 1930s held the homes of several former generals who later became presidents, Plutarco Elías Calles, Lázaro Cárdenas and Manuel Ávila Camacho. It was also often visited by foreigners, particularly Anglo-Saxons. The first constitutional governor of Morelos state, Vicente Estrada Cajigal(es), authorized construction of a casino complex in Cuernavaca by the Compañía Hispanoamericana de Hoteles. This was a consortium of Mexican businessmen backed by President Abelardo L. Rodríguez. Manuel Suárez y Suárez, an Asturian entrepreneur, was the building contractor. The Casino de la Selva was inaugurated in 1931 near the train station.
The layout was relatively simple. There was a large fountain at the entrance, then a main driveway between two blocks of rooms, one on each side. The drive led to the main hall, used as the gaming room. There was also an Olympic swimming pool, a pediment and some other facilities. The grounds contained bungalows set within the surrounding Amanalco Forest. Hundreds of the trees were at least 100 years old. Two of them were estimated to be over 1,000 years old. The site held springs and a wide variety of plant species. There was evidence of pre-Hispanic culture that could have been over 1500 years old. The pre-Columbian site was first excavated in the 1940s.
Early years (1931–46)
The Casino de la Selva was briefly the most luxurious watering spot in the Americas until the Garci-Crespo Hotel opened in Tehuacán in 1934. However, the owners were unable to pay their debts to the state or to the builders. Manuel Suárez was the main creditor and acquired the property in 1934. That year the new president Lázaro Cárdenas took office. One of his first decrees banned gambling in Mexico since he saw casinos as centers of vice. Suárez retained the property but ran it purely as a hotel. Suárez and the Valencian architect Jesús Martí Martín founded the company Vías y Obras, which built facilities in the ports of Veracruz, Acapulco and other cities. Suárez built the Hotel Mocambo in Veracruz, and was involved in other industries, including sugar mills.
In 1938 Malcolm Lowry moved to Cuernavaca to work on his novel Under the Volcano, and described the hotel in the first chapter,
Expansion (1946–70) In 1946 the Casino de la Selva was closed so that Vías y Obras could undertake various enlargements under the direction of Martí. The two blocks of rooms were each given a second floor, and a French-style garden was laid out in the area between them. New rooms were added to the main building. Other additions included a large convention hall, a bowling alley and cafeteria, a walkway around the Olympic pool, two more pools and sandy areas to give a beach-like atmosphere. The effect was much like the Hotel Mocambo. Félix Candela came to Mexico to escape Francoist Spain and worked for Vías y Obras from 1942 to 1947. He helped the architect Martí in his renovation of the Casino de la Selva.
Candela is best known for his reinforced concrete shells, which he introduced to Mexico. These are based on hyperbolic paraboloids, in which straight beams can be used to build a saddle roof, and can cover large spans with minimal thickness. At the end of the 1950s the construction company of the brothers Félix, Antonio and Julia Candela built a dining room attached to an auditorium, and a non-denominational chapel in place of the fountain at the entrance, all with shell roofs. Candela's pupil, the architect Juan Antonio Tonda(es), designed the shells and about 30 bungalows in the south of the site and oversaw construction. Later the chapel was converted to a nightclub, the Club Jano, and then the Discoteca Mambo.
The dining room, the Salón de los Relojes (Room of the Clocks), had a roof formed of five paraboloid sections with a large clock hanging from the central point where the arcs intersected. It showed the times of places around the world. The auditorium, reached via the Salón de los Relojes, had a single hyperbolic paraboloid roof and contained the mural La farándula (Showbiz) by the Mexican artist Francisco Icaza, a tribute to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. After 1965 Suárez started various unfinished projects such as a monorail below the pools and a forum to hold large murals by David Alfaro Siqueiros. Later this project was transferred to Mexico City where it became the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, leaving the building at the Casino de la Selva unfinished. The result of these later works was increasing diversity of architectural styles and growing maintenance costs. Lilia Suárez, daughter of the owner, assumed management of the Casino de la Selva in 1966.
Decline and abandonment (1970–2001)
From the 1970s until his death Suárez put most of his energy into the Hotel de México (now the World Trade Center) in the Federal District, a project that grew out of control. The Casino de la Selva was neglected and used only by foreign tourists. Suárez died in 1987. After this the hotel was used as a spa, and was sometimes rented for events such as wedding celebrations and graduations. Cuernavaca continued to expand, but most development happened outside the city center, which had expanded to include the hotel. A bus station was built beside the hotel and in 1991 the Plaza Cuernavaca shopping center opened to its east. In 1994 Suárez's heirs sold the property to the Grupo Situr-Sidek, a hotel company. The deed of sale does not seem to have included any stipulation that the murals were to be preserved. In 1996 the group defaulted on $63.7 million of taxes it owed to the Mexican government, and the Ministry of Finance seized the property.
The Hotel Casino de la Selva was abandoned for several years and deteriorated quickly. The heritage authorities chose not to evaluate the property. Ownership was transferred to the Fondo Bancario de Protección al Ahorro (Fobaproa: Bank Fund for the Protection of Savings). By 2001 the buildings had deteriorated badly, with murals crumbling from neglect, bat guano on interior walls, and litter and human excrement covering the floor of the main salon that held some of the finest murals. The buildings and over of green land were sold in 2001 for 10 million pesos, well below market value. The cultural wealth contained in the property was not declared.
Artwork
Suárez wanted the hotel to be a gathering place for intellectuals and artists, and commissioned various works of art for the walls and gardens. He hired Mexican and Spanish artists such as José Reyes Meza and Josep Renau to decorate the walls with murals showing Mexican history from the pre-Columbian period to the modern age. The murals would cover an area of . The hotel became the center of cultural activity in Cuernavaca and was visited by artists, writers and political activists.
The former gaming room in the main hall came to be called the Salón de los Murales. The Spanish Republican artist Josep Renau painted a mural there of "La Hispanidad" a history of the Iberian Peninsula from the time of the Phoenicians to the conquest of America. The other side of the room held a 1965 mural by José Reyes Meza that depicted indigenous culture in the Valley of Mexico. The hall also had a mural of The Apocalypse by Jorge Flores, a disciple of David Alfaro Siqueiros. Renau's , painted with his wife Manuela Ballester(es), depicted the conquest and colonization of America by the Spanish and covered more than . The walls of the rooms and corridors also held the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, Dr. Atl, Benito Messeguer, Jorge González Camarena, Francisco Icaza, Victor Moscoso and others.
Sculptures in the gardens included pre-Hispanic allegories by Federico Canessi(de) and works by Antonio Ballester. A large equestrian statue of Hernán Cortés by the Spanish sculptor Florentino Aparicio was installed late in 1962. Suárez provided the hotel with a pottery workshop directed by Aparicio, where several noted potters learned their art. In 1980 the ceramicist Gustavo Pérez Mirada was able to rent the workshop for a nominal sum with the help of his friend Ida Rodríguez Prampolini.
Famous visitors
In 1969, the daughter of Manuel Suárez, Doña Lilia Suárez de Rossbach, was director of the hotel. She offered the author Carlos Monsiváis an old bungalow as a quiet space where he could write a book, his Días de guardar, published in 1971. Rafael Buñuel, the younger son of the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, spent six months living at the casino in 1971–72. He auditioned amateur local actors with the idea of staging his play "Las Diecisiete Cajas" (The Seventeen Boxes) which he had successfully mounted the year before as an Off-Off-Broadway Theater piece in New York City. The play was never produced in Cuernavaca, however. In 1971, Doña Lilia invited the well-known stage and film actor Carmen Montejo to start a theatre training program at the 500-seat Casino de la Selva Theater. Among many professional luminaries Sergio Jiménez came from Mexico City to teach classes. Montejo eventually founded the Tespis Theater Group. During the early 1970s Grupo Tespis, in addition to performing in a number of plays directed by Montejo, also produced professional plays. concerts, recitals, and dance performances including appearances by the Argentinian singer-songwriter Facundo Cabral, the Cante Jondo singer Enrique Morente, and the Flamenco dancer Pilar Rioja. The pianist Alfonso Morquecho also performed at the hotel.
The Mexican painter and muralist Gerardo Murillo, better known as Dr. Atl, was among the best-known guests. Dr. Atl would hold marathon conversations from three to four in the afternoon in the dining room with other visitors such as Mario Orozco Rivera and Benito Messeguer. A fragment of Dr. Atl's mural, Architectural view of the City of Puebla, is preserved in the Chapultepec Castle. Leonora Carrington lived in the casino while they built her house in Cuernavaca.
Jules Dassin visited with Luis Buñuel in 1969. They were making preliminary visits to Cuernavaca to sketch out plans for filming Under the Volcano, but the project fell through because they couldn't secure film rights from Joseph Losey.
Demolition
The property was sold at auction in 2001 to a joint venture of the American discount retailer Costco and the Mexican Comercial Mexicana supermarket chain. The partner companies quickly began to clear the site for construction of two large stores, uprooting trees and tearing down many of the buildings. Costco said they would invest over $30 million in the Club de Precios (Price Club) store, which would generate 1,500 temporary and 500 permanent jobs. When the plans became public the Civic Front for the Defense of the Casino de la Selva was formed by local environmentalists, preservationists and small business owners, asking the city to maintain the hotel and turn the land around it into a park.
The issue quickly gained national and international media attention as demolition began in July 2001. The painter José Reyes Meza was refused access to inspect the state of the murals.