The Guadalajara Reporter
Guadalajara's Largest English Newspaper
Some time ago, we stumbled upon a small shelter cave in a remote part of the Primavera Forest, alongside El Río de las Animas, the River of Ghosts. Inside the cave we found a shimmering white, bell-shaped column of rock which I decided to call La Reina de las Animas, the Queen of Ghosts.
If you don’t immediately clutch your purse or iPad when someone asks you for directions in a supermarket parking lot, it means you didn´t read “The Picking of Pepe’s Pocket,” published in this paper two months ago. That column dealt with shopping center scams popular in Guadalajara, but this time the focus is on e-mails. If you’re not too familiar with the subject, read on.
Salvador Mayorga is a man with a view and is also the owner of a ranch with a view. Mayorga was director of Bosque La Primavera for some 12 years and has a passionate love for nature and animals. Today he runs a ranch at the very top of the Santiago River Barranca on Cerro el Mexicano, due north of Guadalajara.
Pinar de la Venta, located eight kilometers west of Guadalajara along highway 15, was once an integral part of the sprawling Bosque de la Primavera, but about 40 years ago, it was turned into a Fraccionamiento Campestre (rustic housing development) and today is home to some 300 families. Of course, no one ever informed the animals, birds and invertebrates living in Pinar that they are outside the boundaries of the forest, so it’s not unusual for Pinareños to find the likes of foxes, possums, coatis and ringtails in their back yards, tarantulas, vinegaroons and rattlesnakes on their porches, motmots, cuckoos and “Tequila bats” visiting their bird feeders and gangs of Acorn Woodpeckers stealing peanuts meant for squirrels.
Guadalajara painter Jorge Monroy, working with a team of three other artists, is nearing completion of a huge mural gracing the newest building of the Antiguo Hospital Civil complex.
The huge Bosque la Primavera that hugs Guadalajara’s west side now has two signposted Interpretive Trails. I described the first one in my September 13, 2013 column and here comes a report on the second.
In the summer of 2010, Jennifer Day, a University of Washington graduate student, and “Scooby the Conservation Canine,” an energetic black Labrador, were invited to spend four days in Jalisco’s Primavera Forest hunting for the scat of wild animals that roam the woods.
