The Americas’ last prison island has become a tourist destination

A group of middle-aged and elderly Mexican tourists walked past a soldier wearing camo fatigues and holding a machine gun, then past a large sniffer Alsatian dog. They stepped onto the ferry at San Blas port, on the west coast of Mexico’s Nayarit state.

Around 100 tourists were taking the four-hour ferry journey to Islas Marías: an archipelago located about 130 kilometers (about 81 miles) off the coast. It was the base of what was the last island penal colony in the Americas, until it was closed in 2019.

In 2022 the Mexican navy, which runs Islas Marías operations, began allowing tourists to visit the archipelago on weekend package tours. Then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who oversaw the prison closure, said in 2019: “What was hell is becoming a paradise.”

He also suggested that the change marked a break from Mexico’s past of political persecution and terrible treatment of convicts, saying, “This is tourism for excursions, to explore, to live with nature.”

Francisco Epinosa was one of the tourists on the ferry. He said that Islas Marías is notorious in Mexico in the same way that Alcatraz is in the US. Epinosa mainly joined the tour because watching the 1951 movie “Las Islas Marías,” directed by Emilio Fernández, made him curious. The movie was filmed on the largest of the six islands comprising the Islas Marías archipelago.

Epinosa said that even without the movie’s influence, Islas Marías would have been well-known across Mexico.

“It was very famous because they had really, really bad criminals,” he said. Islas Marías was notorious for housing some of the country’s most feared killers, and in its early days, held political prisoners.

A big hotel complex has now been built near a beach on María Madre, the largest of the Islas Marías islands, where the prison was located. Today, herds of wild goats canter between gift stores and white-painted villas, and bright green parrots perch overhead in trees.

Islas Marías has 19 endemic animal species, including parrots, raccoons and rabbits. Mexican authorities declared the archipelago a bioreserve in 2000, and then in 2010 UNESCO did the same.

UNESCO said that the islands’ delicate ecosystems had developed in isolation for more than 8 million years. Mexico’s National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) is charged with protecting it with conservation projects.

On María Madre, guides took tourists to the former maximum-security section of the prison — a complex of stark grey buildings surrounded by chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. This section opened in 2011 but only operated for a few years.

Inside a building, tourists perused thick metal cell doors and chrome tables in large atriums. The guides said that the design of this prison section was based on US maximum security prisons. They explained that conditions were so bad, with stingy rations and cramped cells, that prisoners once rioted, and many people died.

Islas Marías was controversial long before the maximum security section was built.

Jose Revueltas, an author and Mexican Communist Party member, who was convicted after attending a union strike, was sent there twice in the 1930s. He is perhaps the most prominent political prisoner who was sent to the prison.

Now, Revueltas is depicted in a large mural in a visitor centre on the main island, wearing spectacles and hunched over a book. His 1941 novel “Muros de Agua,” or Walls of Water, was based on his experience on Islas Marías.

Some prisoners were arguably far more deserving of their confinement than Revueltas. On the weekend tour, the guides took the group to the sun-beaten white stone tomb of José Ortiz Muñoz, known as El Sapo, The Toad.

Ortiz was sent to Islas Marías after committing various murder sprees, and ended up getting murdered himself while incarcerated. The guides said that a group of Islas Marías prisoners killed him with machetes.

In the latter years that the prison operated, the rules evolved and many convicts lived relatively openly on the island, roaming freely and sometimes having family come and stay with them. It was the ocean, rather than locks and walls, keeping them confined.

But many were forced to work under intense sunlight on vast salt flats, as punishment for supposed bad behaviour on the island. The guides showed the tourists the salt flat area, right by a beach. From a derelict brick salt storage building, they could see a large shark moving among ocean waves.

Francisco Epinosa, the tourist on the weekend tour, said he enjoyed the trip, and learning about aspects of his country’s past that he hoped would stay in the past.

“Things are changing, and that’s why they closed it,” he said, before taking the ferry back to the mainland.