In the new landscape of Valle de Bravo, trees are felled and roads are opened in places where the only thing that existed before was forest. Land without vegetation, cargo trucks and advertisements for the purchase and sale of land and housing are becoming more common. Even those that are just under construction are on offer.
This municipality, classified as a “magic town”, is located in the west of the State of Mexico, two hours from the country's capital. Here, golf clubs and summer houses have been part of tourist enjoyment for several years, but the construction boom occurred during the coronavirus pandemic, when remote work allowed more people to arrive and stay.
The expansion, mainly in the southeast of the municipal seat and other neighboring towns, has mobilized its inhabitants. The Citizen Observatory of the Valle de Bravo Subbasin - Amanalco has accompanied citizen complaints to the Federal Attorney's Office for Environmental Protection (Profepa). In the last two months of 2022, they had three in the Avándaro area alone.
The removal of trees, the opening of roads, works without permits, the invasion of federal areas, the creation of private dams, and others have been reported. In addition, there are concerns about pollution due to lack of drainage infrastructure and the availability of water.
Forests and water are one and the same in this place.
Without authorizations
Valle de Bravo is the heart of the forests in the State of Mexico. Its surroundings are mountains full of trees that form hills, ranches and more forests. In the center, the cobblestone and warm streets reach like rivers to a dam also known as Lake Avándaro.
“Enjoy the lake view,” says an advertisement in the southeast of the town. The images that illustrate the advertising are of houses with gardens, pools and balconies. On average, the purchase of a residence of this type is between 20 and 50 million Mexican pesos. While the rents of cabins and houses on the lake range from 15,000 to more than 80,000 pesos per month.
“Areas like San Mateo Acatitlán, Avándaro and San Simón are experiencing a lot of real estate pressure. There is no adequate regulation on issues such as water, services and connectivity,” explains María, a member of the Observatory.
María is not really María, but she has asked to change her name as a security measure since she legally accompanies neighbors. One of the recent complaints at the close of this edition occurred at the end of 2022. Residents of La Polilla, a private company in Avándaro, reported that a real estate complex was being built near the Valle de Bravo dam.
According to the complainants, the residence already had closure stamps by the Office of the Attorney for Environmental Protection of the State of Mexico (Propaem), but work was continuing, so they filed complaints with Profepa and the municipality of Valle de Bravo.
The response was an inspection visit by the federal prosecutor's office. The Observatory said that the agency informed them that the project did not have an Environmental Impact Authorization, which is the accreditation of the change in land use to move from forestry to construction, so that the corresponding sanction would be carried out.
For its part, the organization expanded the complaint because residents insisted that the works were still under way after this.
Profepa has not publicly reported its visit to the La Polilla development, but it has reported five inspections in Valle de Bravo due to complaints received during 2022. Four of them for not having Environmental Impact Authorization. To obtain it, property titles, environmental risk studies and other documents are required that must be evaluated before any other work.
In addition, three of the five closures made by Profepa that year were within the Protected Natural Area (ANP) of Valle de Bravo.
Video of a brief tour of points close to areas of complaints accompanied in the last two years by the Citizen Observatory of the Valle de Bravo Subbasin - Amanalco.
Complaints have also occurred in Rancho Avándaro, Tres Puentes, Cerro Gordo, Velo de Novia and El Capulín. This last area is the best known because last year the company Stupa Ranch S.A. de C.V. started a project of 11 hotel-type villas called “Stuppa Ranch Residencial”.
The complex included service areas, tennis and paddle tennis courts, restaurant, pool, spa, gym, chapel, stables, squares, roundabouts and bridges.
In April 2022, the news of this complex reached the morning conference of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who, when questioned by the press, said that he was not aware, but that he would attend to it with the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources. A couple of days later, Profepa attracted the case and came to put up the closing seals.
Despite these advances, citizens perceive the efforts as insufficient.
“The complaints that are being made by citizens take several months (to be addressed). It seems that (the authorities) are not keeping up with the amount of irregularities in the area and that has been one of the biggest complaints, that when someone reports a work, the authority takes so long to get it to inspect that construction is progressing a lot and that makes it more difficult to put everything back”, describes María, from the Observatory.
The felled trees
In the State of Mexico, almost half of its soils are forests. 48% of the surface is covered with pine, oyamel and oak, to mention the most common. Of this percentage, the majority have some category of environmental protection area. However, the decrees do not prevent excessive exploitation.
The entity's Forest Protector (Probosque) recognizes that the main causes are clandestine logging, agricultural and livestock activities, the opening of roads and roads, as well as population growth.
Although in Valle de Bravo the direct threat is the real estate boom, in the surrounding area, where the Protected Natural Area extends to ten more municipalities, covering the forest area and the basins of the Valle de Bravo, Malacatepec, Tilostoc and Temascaltepec rivers, there have also been problems with avocado planting and illegal logging.
“Here, forest use is being replaced by clandestine logging. We're starting to see armed people entering privately owned ranches. I'm not saying it's a daily occurrence, but it's happened and we're worried,” says Mariana David, coordinator of the civil association Colonos de las Montañas, in the south of the region.
As a protected area, Valle de Bravo borders other ANPs such as the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Michoacán, the Nevado de Toluca in the State of Mexico and the Bosencheve National Park on the border of both states, so residents hope that the response will be more effective, but the opposite is true.
“We have filed complaints, but follow-up never comes,” David says.
In a national scenario, the number of operations and inspection routes carried out by Profepa, linked to logging, is decreasing.
According to information provided through transparency for this report, in 2016 the environmental prosecutor's office had 66 operations, while in 2022, 33 were registered across the country. In regions such as Valle de Bravo, from 2015 to date, only one operation has been reported in the area.
Although the number of environmental inspectors increased from 443 in 2021 to 660 in 2022, there are only 29 in the State of Mexico. The majority are concentrated in Mexico City at 159, while the rest of the states do not exceed 34, according to requests for information.
Forest water, city water
Beyond the immediate, in Valle de Bravo, any impact transcends the region. Its forests are the water factories of the center of the country. The dam and the rivers that go to it are a source for the Cutzamala System that supplies Mexico City and the municipalities of the State of Mexico that form the metropolitan area.
“Most real estate developments are traditional. They are under unsustainable construction practices. They occupy large areas of land, they don't have a drainage network, they hog rivers and springs to generate their own water reserves,” explains Sandro Cosi, director of Procuenca, an organization that carries out conservation actions in Valle de Bravo.
Procuenca also monitors water at 33 points in the region. Thanks to this, they have been able to identify sites where water quality is affected by pollution. Some are San Francisco, Cascada Colonos and El Salto, where the presence of coliform bacteria has been greater.
According to Cosi, Valle de Bravo has the same problem as most municipalities in the country when colonies expand faster than they can provide adequate drainage services.
“Often rainwater is mixed with wastewater and treatment plants become oversaturated and don't do their job well or simply build drinking water treatment infrastructures that cost money to operate, municipalities with a budget deficit cannot afford them and abandon them,” explained the director of Procuenca.
Regarding the storage of the Valle de Bravo dam, last February, the Water Basin of the Valley of Mexico Agency of the National Water Commission (Conagua) indicated that it registered a storage capacity of 55.22%. On the tours along the banks of Avándaro, you can see how the lake has lowered its tributary to what it was years before.
For water specialists, this is worrying not only for Valle de Bravo but also for Mexico City and the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico, since that is where water is directed through the Cutzamala System.
“As that aquifer is exhausted, pressure on external water sources increases,” Cosi says, referring to how the need for Cutzamala is related to water sources such as that of Valle de Bravo.
The options for dealing with real estate expansion range from increasing inspection and surveillance to enforcing the environmental protection law against any construction.
In the upper regions of the Valle de Bravo basin, community forest management has allowed for more important forest use. The director of Procuenca insists on looking to these regions to learn from “nature-based” solutions that could become public policies.
“The day when we truly return to seeing this region as one of the main sources of water and plans and budgets are allocated as established, we can begin to turn this problem around,” he concludes.
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