Mexican Oasis

At first glance, Mexico City's newest hotel, the $24 million Camino Real, looks like a fortress. To guests, including the International Olympic committeemen checking in last week, that might have been a reassuring thought while students battled the army. But nothing could have been farther from the mind of Architect Ricardo Legorreta when he designed the hotel. His aim had been simply to create an oasis of greenery and quiet in the center of a bustling, dusty city. "People are pushed and rushed too much," says Legorreta. "To me, one of the nicest things a hotel can do is give the guest space, silence, and keep the world out."

The Camino Real might well have been a tall tower a few blocks from the fashionable Reforma boulevard, with its rooms overlooking Mexico City's great Chapultepec Park and an undistinguished, slightly seedy neighborhood. Instead, its brick-bearing walls rise just five stories high, and the 750 rooms all look inward over landscaped patios with gardens and glistening pools. Why? In part because the owners, the Western International hotel chain, wanted to build something different in Mexico City. Another reason, according to Jose Brockman, president of Western International Hotels de Mexico, "a high-rise hotel would have cost three times as much as a low one and taken twice as long to build. We wanted the Camino Real ready in time for the Olympics, so it had to be low."

The President Walks. "Mr. Brock man is a fine client. But we fought a lot," says Legorreta, with the grin of a man whose ideas have won out. A giant whirlpool froths and roars in the entrance plaza. Arriving cars will be whisked up a ramp to a parking wing, while guests register in the vast lobby. Most of the hotel, inside and out, is finished in rough white plaster; art works enliven public places, and there are whole walls painted in fierce pink, yellow or purple--all good Mexican colors. The bedrooms are unusually large --some 23 ft. by 14 ft.--and the corridors are 10 ft. wide.

Since the hotel faces inward, it seems to shun its neighborhood. "You have to think of the hotel as a ship. The blank outside walls are only to protect the inside," says Legorreta. For extra privacy, the guest rooms are far from the hustle of the lobby, convention rooms, three restaurants and seven bars.

The big problem with such a decentralized layout is that guests have to walk a long way to their rooms, and room service might arrive manana. To cut down on the time lag, the hotel on each floor keeps a roaming cart that is in constant touch with the kitchen by radio. The hallways are designed to make guests enjoy their walk by providing surprise glimpses of the gardens and pools. President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz of Mexico was so delighted by the walks that he lingered 90 minutes exploring the hotel, though he had scheduled only a 25-minute visit.

With the Olympics just days away, the Camino Real is booked solid, and the guest book reads like the International Who's Who. There or expected are the Dukes of Edinburgh and Luxembourg, the Princes of Liechtenstein, Holland and Norway; Jesse Owens, Johnny Weismuller and Valen Brumel, the Russian high-jumper. Staying in the enormous presidential suite facing its own swimming pool is Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee and a hotelman himself (La-Salle-Madison Hotel). His judgment of the Camino Real: "Excellent. Unusual. It's really something."

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