The landmark resort has weathered many changes over the past century.
Stained glass over the entrance to the Rosarito Beach Hotel, with the image of the late owner Maria Luisa Chabert. Photo taken iin July 2024. As you walk through double doors into the Rosarito Beach Hotel, the first thing you see is a fan-shaped piece of stained glass over the door with a fetching senorita. Below the glass, an inscription reads in Spanish “Through these doors pass the most beautiful women in the world.
The hotel is officially considering its anniversary as July 27 and hosting a special ticketed bash on July 20 that’s open to all. In 1937, owner Barbachano married actress Maria Luisa Chabert, and she moved to then-remote Rosarito Beach, her husband promising he would build her a mansion. The changes were a hit with vacationers, and the hotel prospered until Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. With the U.S. at war, officials demanded that the hotel institute blackout conditions to keep Japanese bombers from finding the coast. These restrictions virtually shut the hotel down until after the war.Maria Luisa Chabert, longtime owner of the Rosarito Beach Hotel.
Then-owner Torres took out a bank loan to build 80 new rooms in the three-story Playas Tower, with small kitchenettes. Times were good, and in 1991, Torres added the eight-story 147-room Coronado Tower with ocean views, increasing the capacity to 280 rooms.“People were very afraid at the border,” son Hugo Antonio Torres recalled. “Instead of 100% occupancy in the summer, we had 30%.”
Hotel owner Hugo Eduardo Torres was mayor of Rosarito Beach at the time, and cooperated in the disarmaming of the entire city’s police force, which was judged to be corrupt. According to his son, a government investigation later revealed that more than half of the police officers in Rosarito were corrupt and involved with the cartels.
According to the younger Torres, the hotel business picked up again from 2015 to 2020, but then briefly crashed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Occupancy fell to as low as 10%, he recalls.
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