Fiestas de San Andres in Ajijic

The Patron Saint of Ajijic, San Andres, the Fisherman, is honored for the last 9 days of November every year. These Fiestas are also called “The Fiestas de Noviembre”.

Gardeners, waiters, construction workers and the employees of a local hotel, the Nueva Posada, participate in the early morning and evening pilgrimages to the church in the plaza to mass, igniting loud skyrockets which tradition has it will frighten away evil spirits.

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U.S. – Mexico Crime Rate Comparison

You would think right off the bat that surely crime in the United States is far lower on average than it would be in Mexico. At least that’s what more Americans would be inclined to initially believe. As it turns out it depends on what category of crime you are looking at

The numbers fluctuate from year to year but on average they remain within a certain ballpark. If you were to look at total crimes committed in the United States per l00,000 inhabitants the number would be about 4000 per year.

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Crime in the USA vs. Mexico

Over the next few blogs I would like to share some information I have uncovered to refute the “dire” warnings issued in travel advisories about Mexico.

Just about every country in the world is now experiencing increased crime rates. However, there are usually safe areas in every country where the crime rate is lower or non-existent. Ajijic, Lake Chapala is one of those safe areas.

The US State Department put out a warning about the violence in Mexico. Although the report states that 128 Americans were killed in Mexico between Jan 2006 and December 2008 one has only to look more closely at the data for the northwestern part of Mexico including Rosarito Beach, Ensenada, Mexicali, San Felipe, Tecate and Puerto Penasco to see that 42 Americans were killed, from all causes (there were at least 4 suicides) in the last three years combined.
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Published in CRA Magazine Inside Winter 2003 Edition

From the depths of the Canadian winter, it is tempting to consider the delights of relocating or retiring to Mexico. Canadian expat and real estate agent Kevin Collins explores one aspect of the dream – buying a house in the idyllic village of Ajijic on Lake Chapala.

Buying Into Mexico
Fifty years ago, the first North American expats settled in the Lake Chapala region of Mexico. Today, the best estimate of the foreign population is between 5,000 and 6,000, about half of whom are Canadian.
I came to Ajijic eight years ago and found what was, for me, an ideal combination of location, people and weather. Ajijic is a small town, with little tourist traffic. However, proximity to cosmopolitan Guadalajara and to the international airport ensure that the town is not isolated. A four-hour drive will take me to the beautiful Pacific Ocean or to one of at least ten historic and charming colonial cities. The people of Ajijic could not be kinder or more tolerant of the expats who share their town: being polite is an art form here. So many Mexicans speak English that it is possible to get along with very little Spanish (mine is limited to the topics of food, beverage and golf), but I know that I have missed a great deal by not taking advantage of the many opportunities to study it properly!

REAL ESTATE REALITIES

To provide stability against the fluctuating Peso, houses here are priced in U.S. dollars. More that 95 per cent of home sales are cash deals. Occasionally owners are willing to take back some financing for a year or two but this is unusual and any problems can be tied up in the local court system. While there is a misconception that you cannot obtain a direct deed in Mexico, this is only true of areas close to a border or the ocean. Establishing clear title is handled by a specialized lawyer or notary appointed by the government to deal with all real estate transactions. While remarkably few problems arise, you may wish to get references from recent clients.

Since there are no disclosure laws to speak of, make sure your agent informs you of any problems with the physical structure of the home you are considering. While this sounds very scary, the truth is that there aren’t that many major problems with the homes here, and repairs are relatively inexpensive. Closing costs, which are the responsibility of the buyer, are largely based on the fiscal evaluation that the municipality puts on the property. You must sign an application as a foreigner buying property under the laws of Mexico (this costs approximately $430 (U.S.) for each person buying the property). Other costs include the notary fees and the taxes, which are 2 per cent of the fiscal evaluation. Generally speaking, if you are using a reputable realtor and a good notary, the buying process should be quite painless and straightforward. Because of the region’s popularity with expats, housing prices have risen in recent years. Land in the prime areas is limited because there is a fairly narrow strip that runs along the lakeshore and up the hillside above Lake Chapala where you can purchase and build. Above this land is “Ejido” property, set aside for the use of the indigenous population. Most stories about foreigners having problems with their property in Mexico involve people illegally selling Ejido land. While housing prices may be steeper than you expected, property taxes are rarely over $200 (U.S.) a year and domestic help averages around $2 (U.S.) an hour. Few people bother with air conditioning or heating (other than ceiling fans and a fireplace), and utilities are much less expensive than in Canada or the U.S. Combine these benefits with the tax advantages of living abroad and you’ll agree with a client of mine who said, “I’m not wealthy but I always wanted to live like a rich person, and I can do that here.”

LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION

People here will say with great conviction that wherever they live is the best place to be. Many people initially look for property in the old village of Ajijic, but later realize that they are unlikely to find lake views in the village, and it can be noisy at times. While newcomers tend to harbour the romantic notion that they can walk everywhere, most people find they do need a car. Areas such as La Floresta and Villa Nova are walkable to the village but quieter, with wide streets and good quality homes. Up the hill there are more gated communities with wonderful views, and it’s a little quieter (Mexico can be a noisy place: dogs, roosters and music are everywhere, but you do get used to it after a while!). The Racquet Club has wonderful views, nice common pool area and lots of tennis activities, but it is a 10- to 12-minute drive from town. That does not sound like much but your world shrinks here and it is too far out for some people. You get more for your money outside the prime areas, but resale becomes a real issue if you get too far out. The exception to this rule might be the Chapala Country Club area, which has a nine-hole golf course and a good social scene. However, it may be too far away from the amenities of Ajijic for non-golfers. No two homes in Ajijic are alike. The houses are as eclectic as the people who choose to settle here, and while that makes living here fun, it takes some getting used to. Even the best neighbourhoods will have a series of wonderful houses and then a cornfield in the middle of everything. The local custom of building houses behind walls enhances privacy and security, and maximizes utilization of space.

RESEARCH

The best way to begin gathering information about the Lake Chapala region is to get on the Internet, starting with . While common sense would suggest renting for a season to two before buying, it can be difficult to find a long-term rental; most people use their homes here for at least half the year. It is hard (but not impossible) to find a decent rental from American Thanksgiving through Easter. The only slow period is from Easter till the middle of June, when people from Texas, Arizona and Florida arrive to escape the heat during the summer months. An excellent accommodation base for a fact-finding mission to Ajijic is La Nueva Posada, a small, charming hotel located in the village of Ajijic right on the shore of Lake Chapala (e-mail: ). It is owned and operated by the Eager family, Canadians who have been here since 1975. The Eagers are a good source of information on any number of subjects. You might want to book early because they have only 19 rooms and four garden suites (the latter with kitchens and living rooms). As someone once said, ”People buy with their hearts and then justify it with logic.” So if you fall in love with a place, don’t fight it. You don’t have to make a hasty decision, but remember, paralysis through analysis could keep you from moving anywhere! Meanwhile, “Hasta lo mas pronto posible!” (Spanish phrase for “See you real soon, eh!”).

The Mexico They Never Left

by Roger Toll, former Editor of Mexico City News (Delta Sky Magazine, February 2006)

Near Guadalajara, the lakeside town of Ajijic has proven irresistible to many Americans. Here’s why.

If the cherished ideals of human unity and harmony between cultures remain hard to achieve, maybe we’d best look to a basic biological concept for a solution. Symbiosis, the dictionary says, is the life association of two dissimilar organisms for mutual benefit. I thought of this on a recent visit to Ajijic (pronounced “ah-HEE-heek”), the prettiest of several towns laced together by a two-lane highway running along the northwest shore of Mexico’s largest lake, Chapala, 45 minutes south of Guadalajara. It is midsummer, the rainy season, where the air is soft and the surrounding mountains turn an exuberant tropical green. The setting is bucolic, Old World, with a rustic church and peaceful plaza, and a gazebo waiting for a band to arrive. Cobblestone streets slow traffic to a genteel crawl, and people come and go, murmuring a polite “buenos dias” as they amble by.

It is a scene replicated in thousands of towns throughout Mexico. But in one way, Ajijic and its lakeside neighbours–Jocotopec, San Juan Cosala, San Antonio Tlayacapan, Chapala–stand alone, not only in Mexico, but in the world. For they are home to the largest population of Americans and Canadians living outside their own countries. This being Mexico, no one is quite sure how many foreigners there are, nor does anyone seem to know the total population of these lakeside towns. But guesses place the foreigners at about 10,000 during the high season of winter, amid a total population of 60,000.

Ever since Americans began migrating to Ajijic in the 1950s, detractors have said it’s where old gringos go to die. Granted, most of the foreigners are retired, though more and more younger people have made the move after corporations began offering early retirement. Reduced incomes become a lot more elastic in the Latin American economy, and the lakeside’s perfect, spring-like weather, with average temperatures ranging between 67 and 78 degrees Fahrenheit (19-26 Celsius) year-round, seems like a dream to long-suffering veterans of harsh winters or sizzling summers. Comfortable, stylish homes, even Spanish Colonial gems, are half the price of their equivalents back home, and employing a full-time gardener and a maid or cook is no longer an unjustifiable luxury. Labor, goods, and restaurant meals are impressively inexpensive. Life is comfortable and relaxed, and there’s little cause to hurry anywhere.

“I’m on the younger side of the expatriate curve here,” says Kevin Collins, a wry, 49-year-old former advertising executive from Toronto who moved here a decade ago. “But the average age of foreigners is coming down pretty quickly, probably around early 60s by now.” We meet over drinks in the sprawling garden of La Nueva Posada, the town’s best hotel, whose bedraggled charm is reminiscent of a setting in a Graham Greene novel. Collins, who moved to Ajijic with his wife and two children, has lowered his golf handicap to 6 after years of playing three times a week at the nearby nine-hole golf club. He has also become the area’s top real estate agent.

“People get fantastic medical attention in Guadalajara, which is probably why we have so many older gringos tottering down the cobblestone streets here,” Collins says. “Any other place, they wouldn’t get such good attention for so little money.” Besides, he says, the elderly can be well cared for in their own homes because help is so readily available, loyal and inexpensive. “Mexicans are very warm and caring by nature,” Collins adds, “and they value and respect the elderly.”

Retirees often find they are rejuvenated by the prevailing live-and-let-live attitude of Mexican culture. Foreigners give themselves permission to go a little eccentric–what the British call “going native”–painting their walls in bright Mexican pinks and yellows, for example, or wearing arty, bohemian clothes that might have been frowned on when they were dressing for their neighbors back home. One senses a zest, a youthful spirit won back after years of tending to corporate or family imperatives, a feeling of being freed by distance to become what their fantasy dictates. Some take to playing roles in a string of theater productions, while others start painting. (D.H. Lawrence lived and wrote in the Lakeside towns in the 1920s–just one milestone in Ajijic’s thriving art scene.) The entrepreneurial Norte-americanos open shops and restaurants as ways of keeping busy in the relaxed small-town ambience.

Walking along cobblestone Constitucion Street early one evening, I encounter two seventy-somethings in colorful dresses and long gray-blond hair who pull up to a curb on a cherry red ATV like two 18-year-olds. “Come on in,” they say as they stride into Tom’s Bar. “There are some fun people who come here, and they serve great sandwiches.” Tom’s is a small dive that has blossomed into a popular American and Canadian watering hole. Due to a satellite hook-up and a new television, it is the place to watch weekend games in the robust company of expats. I sit at the bar beside Fred, a 48-year-old building contractor who was passing through town and decided to stay. He’s been in Ajijic now for 17 years.

Many foreigners, armed with a social conscience and strong community action skills that they’ve imported along with their cars, throw themselves into the long list of organizations that have helped make Ajijic one of the most communally active towns in Mexico. “With all the charity and fund-raising events, the foreign community has launched a lot of programs that support crippled and orphaned children, old people, scholarship and health programs, and so much more,” says Teresa Kendrick, author of Mexico’s Lake Chapala and Ajijic: The Insiders Guide. Kendrick came from Austin, Texas, to Guadalajara on vacation 11 years ago, and stayed for a spell. Three years after that, at age 42, she moved to Ajijic, where she had found her Eden. “Take stray animals,” she says. “When I got here, there was an abject neglect of dogs and cats. Now we have an excellent pound, and animal-care groups train kids in school to care for animals. It’s common to see well-fed dogs with collars and leashes out walking with families. It’s been a really positive change.”

Gringo retirement dollars have had a huge impact, and the Mexican population appreciates the economic benefits, even if at times it means putting up with some angry or impatient Northerners who haven’t yet acculturated to the slower pace of life and different norms of behavior. “Unfortunately, we always get some rude foreigners with nasty tempers,” says Kendrick. “They want everything now and in the way it’s done in the States, so they don’t really fit in here.” But most people, she says, blossom in the warmth of the community and learn to adjust their expectations.

Ajijic’s mayor, Ricardo Gonzalez, believes communication between the two communities is ‘very beautiful because each side respects the other.” Foreigners, he says, have improved the area’s education, environment and health, especially in the area of nutrition, and have led efforts to clean up the town. “We have lived here for many generations so we don’t change too fast but we are learning many useful things from them that improve our lives,” he says. According to the mayor, people don’t feel envy towards the foreigners’ relative wealth, because that money flows into the economy. “We have full employment, and our salaries our higher than elsewhere in Mexico,” he says.

“The foreigners seem to like our Mexican traditions, and we appreciate that,” Gonzalez adds. For instance, even though it is an unusual customs for Northerners, the community still celebrates the Dia de los Muertos, he points out, rather than Halloween. “Both our groups are benefiting from living together and exchanging our cultural ways. So, yes, I think the foreigners are learning a lot from us as well.”

Article reproduced as it appeared in Delta’s Sky Magazine (February 2006) — written by Sky contributing editor Roger Toll, who lives in Park City, Utah, is the former editor of Mexico City News.

Lake Chapala is the largest lake in Mexico and is protected by an association designed to protect living lakes.

For us it is paradise. Coming from Toronto, Canada we appreciate now living in the best climate in the world. Some say Kenya is good too but the political situation and distance from home is a little undesirable for us.

Few people knew about Ajijic, Lake Chapala when we first moved here in 1994. This was good and bad. Good because the carretera was free of traffic and one could obtain a parking spot in the village with ease. Bad because should you want anything out of the ordinary it meant a trip to Guadalajara or had to be put on your list for when you visited home.

I remember loading up on my Twining’s Earl Grey Decaffeinated Tea at Loblaws in Toronto, only to find it here on the shelves of Superlake. I also would buy vacuum bags (we had not yet gone bagless) and a host of other “necessities”.

If you do find that you cannot find some article here or in Guadalajara another option is to order it from the US and have it shipped to your Mail Boxes Etc. address in Laredo, Texas and they look after all the customs for you. Call Mail Boxes Etc. here in Ajijic at 766-0647 and they will help you set up this service.

I have had difficulty in finding a Hoover Upright Vacuum Cleaner in Ajijic, Lake Chapala or Guadalajara so I am going to order one online and have it shipped here.

I thing the reason for this lack of quality vacuum cleaners is that most people have tile, slate or marble floors and there is not a lot of broadloom (more…)

I must admit that my expectations for the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics were not very high considering the Beijing opening and closing ceremonies.

However, I was soon filled with pride as I watched all the aboriginal groups of Canada walk into the stadium. Every aboriginal group was represented from coast to coast to coast and proceeded to do ceremonial dances for over an hour in full native dress as they welcomed the athletes from 82 countries parade in front of over 60,000 cheering fans.

My family and my excitement was further heightened by the stunning visual (more…)

This morning I was enjoying a leisurely morning at Yoly’s Beauty Parlor (manicure, pedicure and hair) when I overhead a man talking about wanting to move to Mexico from Durango, Colorado but was having difficulties in convincing his wife to make the move.

I totally related to this as it took 10 years for my husband to talk me into making the move from Toronto 15 years ago.

As I have often said, I wish he had found the right words sooner as I have enjoyed every minute of every day since arriving in 1994.

This is not uncommon as many couples are not always on the same page as one party or the other is dragging their feet.

There are many reasons for this. Fear of the unknown is at the top of the list along with fear of language challenges.

Also leaving family, children and grandchildren, aging parents, homes lived in for many years and familiar surroundings give many pause.

I understand and have experienced all of these doubts along with the worry of raising our children (then 10 and 12) here in Ajijic, Lake Chapala.

Two things finally pushed me into agreeing with my husband to make the move. First was the coldest winter in Canada for over 50 years and second, the huge increase in our real estate taxes we were about to face.

It was my husband’s mother who put to rest of my fears about my children by telling me (more…)

A few weeks ago there was a 6.1 earthquake in Port Au Price in Haiti which is one of the poorest countries in the world. Normally, when disaster strikes there are neighboring communities that can pitch in but such is not the case here. Everyone is very poor and thousands of people were killed. Thousands more left homeless, hungry and desperate for news of their family and friends.

Help poured in from many countries and, of course, the US, but it took some time to coordinate the immediate needs and the best way to access the airport to get aid to the people.

Food, water, blankets were vital and shelter and protection for the children left without parents.

Medical attention was crucial and workers to help find any survivors and dig them out of wherever they were trapped. They had neither the manpower nor the equipment necessary for such a mammoth undertaking.

CNN’s Dr. Sanja Gupta has been there from the outset and has joined other medical teams in providing whatever help they could to those who needed it but the numbers were overwhelming.

Aid organizations have been trying to organize who was going to what and (more…)

Being Christmas Eve Eve an’ all, my musings might be a little shorter than usual but I thought this information would be useful to all the holiday travelers.

The Terminal Terrestre cost 20 million pesos to build and will represent major savings to people arriving at the Guadalajara Airport wishing to come to Ajijic, Lake Chapala.

Previously, one had to be picked up or take a cab from the airport to the Lake Chapala area which would cost a minimum of $200.00 with private limos costing a lot more.

The new bus terminal has opened at Guadalajara’s International Airport just in time for the busy holiday season.

Passengers will be able to takes buses from the terminal to various points in the Guadalajara metropolitan zone and surrounding areas, including Chapala. The cost for this service (more…)