An ejido moves to bring 100 hectares into Bacalar, and studies a longer lagoon road

The ejido on Bacalar's northern side has started the work of bringing a 100-hectare settlement into the town proper, where some 150 to 200 families already live. It has also begun asking whether the lagoon boulevard could be extended through its land. The first is a slow process of land, paperwork and services. The second, for now, is a question being asked, and a feasibility study is not a road.

Both moves come from a new board. The Aarón Merino Fernández ejido, one of the farm communities whose land surrounds Bacalar, has a newly formed leadership. Its president, Federico Bucio Martínez, told Luces del Siglo, in a report published September 16, that the two projects aim to give order to urban growth and spur tourism in the north of the municipality. Neither is new as an idea. Both have been waiting on the ejido.

The 100 hectares

The land lies next to the town, close to the lagoon, around the crossroads on the road toward the community of Reforma. According to Bucio, between 150 and 200 families live there now, and the settlement has grown denser because it sits close to the Maya Train infrastructure. That is no accident of geography. In March 2025 a presidential decree expropriated part of this same ejido's land for the train, as Novedades reported at the time.

The delay goes back two decades. Bucio said the land was split into parcels in 2004, when it still belonged to the municipality of Othón P. Blanco, before Bacalar became a municipality of its own. The agreements that should have handed land to the local government for public facilities were never completed. The ejido is now working on that handover: a formal donation to Bacalar's town hall of 16 percent of the 100-hectare polygon, the share set aside for public facilities.

The land is now held as small private property, not as ejido land. So the ejido board is working with the municipality to regularize the lots and bring in basic services: drinking water, electricity, paving, garbage collection and police patrols. Bucio's target is early next year at the latest.

The boulevard, and the road already on paper

The second project is less advanced, and Bucio was careful about it. The board has opened what he called a phase of institutional inquiry into whether the coastal boulevard along the Laguna de los Siete Colores could be extended into the ejido's northern sector. Because the ejido is in the middle of handing over from the old board to the new one, he said, it is first checking whether earlier boards left technical files or executive plans. It will then ask the state agencies whether budget and infrastructure exist, and only after that will it take a formal position.

A road along that shore has been in the news before. In October 2025, Bacalar's mayor, José Alfredo Contreras Méndez, announced a plan to extend the Costera to 14 kilometers, reaching the boutique hotels on Aarón Merino Fernández land. He put the cost at more than 200 million pesos and said the first step was the ejidatarios' authorization to open the road. In February 2026 Heraldo de México reported that the federal infrastructure ministry, SICT, was projecting about 65 million pesos for the Costera Norte, and the municipal treasurer, Paul Romero, called the 14-kilometer extension a priority. On Heraldo's account that is a two-lane road from Villas Pehaltún to Cayuco Maya, parallel to the lagoon, with links to Federal Highway 307. Its environmental application went to Semarnat in December 2020, stalled in June 2022, and according to Heraldo was later taken up for a new evaluation.

The two cost figures are far apart, and neither report explains why. Luces does not say whether the ejido's review is about that same project or a different stretch.

What this does and does not mean

None of this is a road. There is no construction contract on the record and no environmental authorization we could find. The ejido that would have to agree has not yet taken a position. The town has its own condition: in February the municipality said its support depended on guaranteed public access to the lagoon. Romero said the town center has six public access points in about 500 meters of shore, and that Bacalar wants to know how many the ejido would give up along the new road before private frontage takes the shoreline.

Nor are the 100 hectares part of the town yet. The donation is being prepared, not signed, and we found no council vote on it. The early-2027 date for services is the ejido's goal, not a municipal commitment. The lagoon is the other constraint: the mayor himself has called it 'a very sensitive lagoon system', and it is widely described as one of the most fragile ecosystems in the country. In August, Semarnat refused a hotel's environmental assessment on the existing boulevard, and any road along the shore will go before the same office.

Still, the direction is clear. A settlement that grew up around the train is moving toward streets, water and patrols. And the stretch of lagoon north of town, where hotels now sit at the end of dirt roads, has a road plan, a budget line from SICT and, for the first time, an ejido board asking how to take part. For anyone weighing a lot in Bacalar, two questions decide a great deal: which side of the town line it falls on, and whether the road in front is paved. Both are worth checking with the municipality before signing.

For more on the town, see our report on Bacalar's drainage works and annual report and the lagoon hotel permit decision, or browse property for sale in Bacalar.

Sources: Federico Bucio Martínez, president of the comisariado ejidal of Aarón Merino Fernández, as reported by Luces del Siglo, 16 September 2026; José Alfredo Contreras Méndez, municipal president of Bacalar, as reported by Heraldo de México Quintana Roo, 9 October 2025; Paul Romero, municipal treasurer of Bacalar, as reported by Heraldo de México Quintana Roo, 18 February 2026; Novedades Quintana Roo, 6 March 2025.