Meet Me In Mazatlan Mexico

Meet me in Mazatlan

At last, you can hold a big convention in Mazatlan. The famous Mexican resort finally has a heavyweight meetings and conventions center, a $56 million facility that's been on the drawing board “for as long as anyone around these parts can remember,” officials say.
Called the Mazatlan International Center (MIC), the 304,000-square-foot complex edges a sprawling new marina and a golf course a short ride inland from the city's beachfront hotels. The facility, opened last month, is expected to pump the equivalent of nearly a quarter-billion U.S. dollars into the local economy over the next 10 years.
MIC Director General Einar Brodden said the center can handle as many as 4,500 delegates at a time, a figure eventually to be increased to 5,000. He called the center, which was financed by a teachers' union, “a dream come true.”
The MIC's debut is good news for non-convention visitors, too, because it means they'll soon be enjoying a much wider choice of restaurants, night clubs, shops and hotels built to accommodate the expected tidal wave of convention guests.

The five-star Crowne Plaza is among new hotels in town. Photo courtesy of Crowne Plaza.

Vacationers are already bedding down in two new properties opened earlier this year, the luxurious 107-room Crowne Plaza Resort (http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/) and the castle-like Hotel Riu Emerald Bay (http://www.riu.com/) with 716 rooms.
Further increasing the city's current inventory of 10,000 rooms will be a second Riu property to be built on a nearby location, and hoteliers are expected to announce at least two more major developments in 2010.
Delegates to conventions in the MIC will be greeted by a huge, 82-foot-high mural covering one side of the main building. Brodden said the principal characters in the mural – a bearded man surrounded by fishes, a mermaid and a deer – depict a visit to the area by conquistador Hernan Cortes. “Cortes was supposed to have seen mermaids while he was here,” Brodden explained, “and also the big gamefish for which Mazatlan is still world-famous...the deer comes from the meaning of our city's name, “place of the deer.”
The mural is made of some half-million small ceramic squares, all put in place by hand over the last 13 months.
Among the facility's operating efficiencies, water condensed from the MIT's air conditioning system is recycled for use in outside irrigation systems. What's more, energy consumption is cut to miserly levels by a double-glass facade with special thermal and acoustic properties and by highly efficient insulation panels in the building's walls.
Glass portions of the building are shatterproof and designed to withstand hurricane winds of up to 160 mph.
By Bob Schulman