AJIJIC LAKESHORE

Continue another block downhill to the Ajijic lakeshore dock. You can relax, perhaps enjoy a refreshment, and take in the scene. Late afternoons, a gentle breeze often cools the lakeshore. Overhead, great white clouds billow above blue mountains bordering the far shoreline. On the beach by the pier, fishermen mend their nets, while at the beach’s uphill edge, a few indígena women in native costumes weave their colorful wares beneath the great trees that shelter the Restaurant Posada Ajijic.

The restaurant is the present incarnation of the Hacienda de Cuije, founded here by the Saenz family in 1530. In 1938, Englishman Nigel Millet turned the building into a hotel, the Posada Ajijic. By the 1970s, the Posada Ajijic was attracting a loyal clientele, which included a number of artists, writers, and film stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Charles Bronson. New owners, the Eager family of Vancouver, Canada, took over in 1975 and stayed until 1990, when they moved to another hotel nearby. The current proprietors, who operate it as a restaurant exclusively, remodeled the Posada Ajijic to its present state of rustic elegance.

The showplace Hotel La Nueva Posada, which the Eager family built in 1990, is a gorgeous neocolonial creation at the foot of Donato Guerra. It spreads from its intimate, art-decorated lobby through an airy, romantic terrace restaurant, climaxing in a verdant, semitropical lake-view garden.