A few days ago, a quiet but feisty Australian named Caroline Durston passed away in Ajijic, and with her ended the story of Rancho Rio Caliente, for many years one of Mexico’s most famous spas, the favorite of cognoscenti from New York to Paris.
Every soul in Guadalajara has heard of the marvelous hot river in the Primavera Forest and many of them used to faithfully visit it in droves during Semana Santa, but few Tapatíos had any idea what lay beyond a simple sign bearing the one word “SPA” which they might have noticed at a fork in the dirt road leading to Jalisco’s most famous hot-water balneario, deep inside the bosque.
The spa was originally built upon a spot once considered sacred by indigenous people as a place of healing, long before the Spaniards arrived. Rancho Rio Caliente, in fact, sits upon the very source of the Hot River. You have only to dig a hole anywhere in the area and at a depth of about a meter you will find steaming hot mineral water. “It’s highly alkaline,” Caroline told me years ago, “with pH of 8.3 and traces of almost every known mineral salt on the planet, including natural, organic lithium.”
My wife and I spent our first night at the spa in 1985, at the end of a hectic week of house hunting.
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