The billionaire, his Mexican hideouts and me

About ten years ago, when I was living in Mexico, I went to a party at a friend’s beach house. It was a cloudy afternoon on the Pacific coast, but there is a certain moment at the end of the day when the sun sinks below the clouds and floods everything in light. It was then that we all saw what had not been visible before: a mansion, in the distance across the bay, alone on its own beach, with a blue dome and fiery orange walls that suddenly glowed in the dark forest surrounding it. Someone said it was built in 1989 by billionaire corporate raider Sir James Goldsmith. There were zebras and African antelopes on the property; Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger had both been guests.

“Who’s there now?” I have asked.

“It’s a hotel,” someone else said, adding that I could stay there too if I wanted.

That kind of ostentatious luxury felt a little too much like Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord, to me at the time. But I’m also a curious person, who over the past decade has seen the rise of a class of billionaires disappearing into similar retreats. I even admit to fantasizing about what it would be like to step into that “Great Gatsby” universe that exists parallel to ours, sometimes so close you can see it across the bay – a blue dome illuminated like a light flashing inwards the distance. Would it be what I imagined? After thinking about it for years, last spring I made a reservation to see how the billionaire once lived and learn a little about him.

Goldsmith’s 1997 obituary in The New York Times describes him as “a flamboyant British-French financier who supported three families and homes in four countries and used his billions to fight the European Union.” He died of a heart attack in Spain at the age of 64. It was a sudden end to a controversial life, which he devoted first to corporate robberies against companies such as Goodyear and then to politics, when – about twenty years ahead of Brexit – he founded his own political party whose sole aim was a referendum on the future of Britain. in the European Union. Along the way, he bought two properties in Mexico: Cuixmala, the mansion I saw on the coast in the state of Jalisco, and Hacienda de San Antonio, a former 19th-century coffee plantation in nearby Colima state.

“He was one of a kind,” said Alix Marcaccini, Goldsmith’s daughter and his second wife, Ginette Lery, who today runs both estates and whose memories of her father are less about his politics than his obsession with details, such as the detecting fake stories. ups of the pools on the ground with chalk. “My father had this childlike quality; he was constantly amazed by the simple beauty of things. He always said, ‘If you have built something that is not beautiful, do not keep it, because your eye will get used to it.’

In the lair of the ‘Tin King’

My journey into the aesthetic world of Goldsmith began at Hacienda de San Antonio. The Mexican landscape has no shortage of plantations from a bygone era that now lie in ruins, as if out of an Edgar Allan Poe story. But not this one: the drive to the hacienda, at the end of a well-maintained road on the property, ends at the main house, which rises pink and black and looks as if it was built yesterday.

Tropical birds sang in the afternoon sun as I walked around checking out the site. There was a winding garden with fountains and geometric hedges meant to evoke atmosphere Alhambra in Spain. A swimming pool with a checkerboard bottom was reminiscent of that of Hearst Castle in California. But the looming volcano in the background made it clear that I wasn’t in any of those other Xanadus: the Volcán de Colima, one of the most active in Mexico, is just eight miles away and can often be seen billowing with clouds of smoke.

My room was a large room with ceilings several feet high, hardwood beams above, and a fireplace that beckoned just a few steps from the bed. I opened the cupboard, expecting to find a cupboard inside, but found a minibar inside, stocked with shakers, wine glasses and some kind of grappa made on site with mango – mangrappa, they called it. I opened the bottle, stretched out on the chaise longue and opened a book. It couldn’t have been more fun.

After dinner and a restful night, I headed out the next day with Eliceo Ramírez Castellanos, an on-site guide nicknamed Chito, to Rancho Jabalí, the 5,000-acre ranch adjacent to the plantation house. Mr. Ramírez began the story of the ranch with his own story. His family, he said, had already managed the farm before Goldsmith bought it, having settled in a village of hundreds created to run the sprawling hacienda. The first owner was a German coffee magnate named Arnoldo Vogel, who came to plant Arabica bushes in the 1870s. According to legend, the plantation’s coffee was served to the German imperial family.

Mr. Ramírez parked the car and went into the stables, returning with some horses which we mounted and rode into the woods. It was the dry season in Mexico and the forest was parched; the leaves crackled under the horses’ hooves. Mr. Ramírez continued the hacienda’s story: Vogel died in the 1920s, he said, and after decades of decline the plantation was picked up by a Bolivian mining magnate, Antenor Patiño, known in the press by his nickname, the Tin King. . Goldsmith, Mr. Ramírez said, was married to a daughter of Patiño and later bought the hacienda after acquiring the land to build Cuixmala, his other Mexican estate.

Coffee, mining, Wall Street finance – the staples of this plantation varied over time, I told Mr. Ramírez. We had dismounted from the horses and were looking at the landscape around us: a waterfall, a lake and towering trees. Mr. Ramírez gestured. “This part doesn’t change with the owners,” he said.

The night felt chilly, which always surprises me in the tropics. “It’s the height,” said the woman who came to light the fireplace in my room; After all, we were at the place where coffee used to be grown, almost 4,000 feet above sea level. I still couldn’t resist looking at the stars, so I put on a sweater. You could see Sagittarius, shaped like a teapot, and the Milky Way pouring out of its spout. I walked to the small chapel dedicated to Saint Anthony, after whom the hacienda was named, where a few candles were burning. I had previously been told that it was built when an eruption spared the plantation after Vogel’s wife prayed to the saint. In the distance the volcano sat quietly in the moonlight.

Under the dome

The next day I was on my way to Cuixmala. The journey heads downhill, first through the state capital of Colima and then along a fast highway until you reach the ocean, where the air is suddenly humid and the coconut plantations stretch for miles. Two hours after leaving San Antonio, I turned left at an inconspicuous sign. A man with a clipboard lifted a barrier and told me to follow his colleague, who was waiting for me on a motorcycle.

Five minutes down the dusty road the man on the motorbike stopped and pointed to the lagoon we were passing. A crocodile slid into the water, followed by a second. Something else was moving in the distance, so I squinted. It was a herd of zebras grazing in a field across the water. As it turned out, Cuixmala dwarfed the size of the hacienda – some 36,000 hectares in total, most of which serves as a nature reserve for a menagerie of African animals, along with numerous native species such as jaguar and ocelot, and is cared for by approximately 400 employees.

I had seen Goldsmith’s mansion at that party years ago, but that fleeting sight hardly prepared me for what it would be like to see the place as it filled my field of vision. The dome, which had been just a tiny speck from far away, was now a massive, tiled rotunda with blue and yellow chevrons on top of the roof. Two bronze statues – a rhino and a gorilla – playfully guarded the entrance.

I walked up the grand stairs feeling a bit like a prince, past fountains and even more sculptures. It was the golden hour and the wind was blowing through a curtain in the window. I looked out: about a hundred feet below, a secluded beach stretched a mile long, with waves crashing in from the Pacific Ocean.

Goldsmith’s architect, the Frenchman Robert Couturier, had chosen an almost imaginary mix of Mexico and Morocco. There were Moorish-style latticework on the doors and halls filled with Michoacán craft ceramics. The bowl was enormous. I passed a whitewashed library full of books and red couches to read them on. I passed a ten-sided courtyard with a fountain and entered my room – one of only four in the mansion – where I was greeted by a dragon alebrije, a colorful Mexican statue that tourists often take home in their suitcases. This one stood on its hind legs and was as tall as me.

Cuixmala has two private beaches and the next morning I went to the second. The property’s boat captain was ready to take me out to see what lay north of the coast. No zebras or moose, it seemed; the Goldsmith Reserve soon gives way to a series of other luxury mansions, each with its own pier. (Ms. Marcaccini has fought for years with her neighbors, including Mexican billionaire Roberto Hernández, to block the development.) We passed an abandoned fishing village on an island; Encouraged, we threw out a fishing line, but the fish didn’t bite that day.

On my last evening in Cuixmala, Efraín Saucedo, the house manager, revealed a surprise: “All the other guests have checked out today, so the house is yours tonight.”

I knew that such an opportunity would probably not arise again, even if I returned. Where would I start? First I asked for a margarita and headed out to watch the sunset over the ocean. The drink was strong; the reds and purples in the sky swirled like Diego Rivera’s “Evening Twilight at Acapulco.” Then I walked into the reading room, pulled out a copy of the first book I found (a thick tome with images of ancient Mesoamerican pottery), and pretended the entire library was mine.

What was it like to feel like a billionaire for a night? I will say it was a little lonely. The most beautiful places in the world should never be the domain of just one person; they are meant to be shared.

As I fell asleep, I thought I could hear a party coming from another beach house in the distance. And I imagined someone looking at the mansion, as I once did, and wondering who was there.

If you go

Both the Mexican states of Jalisco and Colima currently have Department of State advisories against traveling due to crime and kidnapping, something you should consider carefully before traveling yourself.

How do you get there: The main airport serving both hotels is Playa de Oro International Airport in Manzanillo, 90 minutes from Cuixmala and two hours from Hacienda San Antonio. The hotels also arrange private charters from various points in Mexico.

Cuixmala: Suites in the main building range from $880 to $2,200 per night during the summer and early fall; from $1,100 to $2,750 during winter and spring. The property also has private villas that cost as much as $7,700 per night, and smaller casitas for around $600 per night.

Hacienda San Antonio: Rooms range from $760 to $1,300 per night during the summer; from $980 to $1,900 in winter.

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