- A controversial hotel opened its doors to the public in 2023 in the Paracas National Reserve’s buffer zone, which acts as a protective strip around the reserve to minimize any impact on the protected area.
- The Hotel Boutique Atenas is owned by a former police officer with a history of land ownership conflicts. The hotel does not appear to have the required permits from Peru’s National Service of Natural Protected Areas, Mongabay Latam found.
- It was also built on a property currently subject to a land dispute. Marine farmers who work there claim to have been forcefully displaced from this area.
PARACAS, Peru — As the sun set over Paracas Bay on April 7, 2023, a beachside hotel flashed with the lights of an electronic music party. Seen from afar, the building was a fluorescent dot twinkling in the darkness. The event started at 2 p.m. and continued into the night, sending thumping bass frequencies into the neighboring Paracas National Reserve, home to more than 1,500 animal species.
By the next day, the Hotel Boutique Atenas and its “We Out There” event had become a news story. Peru’s national agency in charge of protected areas had not authorized the event, which sparked concern about the ill effects of noise pollution on the reserve. The incident is just one chapter in the controversial story of the hotel — apparently built by a former police captain, without an environmental permit, just a few steps from the official boundary of one of Peru’s most emblematic marine protected areas.
The Hotel Boutique Atenas is located in the buffer zone of Paracas National Reserve, a cluster of desert and marine ecosystems some 250 kilometers (155 miles) down the coast from Lima, the nation’s capital. It sits on an 11-hectare (27-acre) plot of land known as El Refugio. Today, the owners of El Refugio are locked in a dispute over occupation of the land with Peru’s national ports company, which is accusing them of a crime termed “aggravated usurpation.”
Mongabay Latam reviewed the property’s registration papers and analyzed court records and other documents issued by Peru’s National Service of Natural Areas Protected by the State, known by its Spanish acronym SERNANP, and the town of Paracas. We also visited the area and interviewed residents, public officials, lawyers and scientists.
Our reporting reveals a series of problems in the transfers of the property’s ownership and in projects carried out without authorization, which could cause negative impacts for the reserve and its wildlife, which includes endangered species such as the Peruvian tern (Sternula lorata), a rare bird threatened by habitat loss. It also shed light on a series of allegedly violent displacements affecting a group of scallop farmers who have long operated in the area.
‘They came with excavators and closed everything off’
To reach the Hotel Boutique Atenas, one must cross the reserve’s Cequión-Atenas sector, designated a strict protection zone due to the “great importance of its diversity and abundance of resident and migratory birds,” according to the reserve’s master plan. A control station at the entrance to the reserve requests an entrance fee of 11 Peruvian soles, just under $3.
The Hotel Boutique Atenas is one of a small number of tourism developments in the reserve’s buffer zone. It is marketed as a luxury destination — a room costs $150 plus tax, not cheap in Peru — where guests can have “contact with nature” and “enjoy the ocean.” But the foundation of this building is not as peaceful as it seems.
Only a few feet away from the hotel, there are vestiges of a displacement that occurred three years ago, one night in January 2021.
“About 300 security guards came with excavators and closed everything off,” an eyewitness told Mongabay Latam. “They destroyed the camp, they didn’t let anyone enter — not prosecutors, not authorities. It was very violent. They put up ‘private property’ signs and took us away.”
The camp was composed of about 20 scallop farmers who had kept wooden huts there since 1995, when Peru’s national port company, known as ENAPU, owned the land. The huts, from which the aquafarmers monitored production of Peruvian scallops (Argopecten purpuratus) in a series of marine plots that the Ministry of Production had granted them, were torn down.
It wasn’t the first time developers had tried to remove the scallop farmers. In 2015, the current owners of El Refugio, the 11-hectare plot of land on which the Hotel Boutique Atenas is located, installed a wooden fence meant to keep them out, according to the scallop farmers.
“A group of between five and eight armed people arrived, making threats; they brought 40 workers to remove the fenced area where we were working,” according to a complaint presented to the Peruvian National Police at the Paracas Police Station, seen by Mongabay Latam.
The scallop farmers’ complaint was closed after nine months by the Criminal Prosecutor’s Office of Pisco province, since it determined that “the owners were only exercising rights over their territory.” The following year, the fence was replaced by a concrete wall, and the scallop farmers filed another complaint with the police about the blockage of their route to the marine concessions. This time, the complaint reached the Joint Criminal Prosecutor’s Office of the province of Pisco.
“They began building a concrete wall that did not allow us to access our plots at the ocean, since they had blocked the path … we could not prevent anything because they came with a large number of workers and armed people,” one of the marine farmers said in his testimony before the prosecutor’s office.
In his statement, the marine farmer added that when he and his companions reported what was happening at El Refugio and requested police intervention, the police commissioner of Paracas “reluctantly” sent an officer. “Upon [our] arrival, a truck blocked our path, even challenging the police officer’s presence. … In the following days, a group of land traffickers was arrested in Chilca. Among those arrested was the police commissioner of Paracas and another person who, when I saw him on the news, I identified him as the person who blocked our path with the truck the day that the police officer accompanied us for the inspection,” the marine farmer said. The case was eventually closed.
The most recent displacement occurred in 2021, but the marine farmers did not formally report it. However, the damage it left allowed ENAPU to file a complaint against two of El Refugio’s current owners for aggravated usurpation. However, the lawsuit, which is still within the Superior Court of Justice, did not discourage the construction of the Hotel Boutique Atenas, which opened to the public in 2023.
Friends in high places
The Hotel Boutique Atenas operates under the trade name Sunset & Sea E.I.R.L. According to records from Peru’s National Superintendency of Customs and Tax Administration, known as SUNAT, this company belongs to a man named Sandro Espinoza Flores.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Espinoza Flores is a former captain of the Peruvian National Police. He is also the general manager of two private security companies: Police Security (which initially employed active state police but now claims to hire only former employees) and Armada Security S.A.C.
Espinoza Flores — well-known in the media due to his close relationship with Óscar López Meneses, who was a close adviser of imprisoned ex-President Alberto Fujimori’s notorious spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos — had already been sentenced for usurpation in Lambayeque, a city on Peru’s northern coast, for taking over a property using deception involving one of his real estate companies, Sweet Land S.A.C., according to a ruling by the nation’s Constitutional Court. That company has also been linked to trials regarding fraud and scams in Chiclayo, another city, in 2017.
Police Security, the Espinoza Flores company, has been in charge of monitoring the property, according to police reports and documents from other authorities. The hotel guards have also claimed that it is Espinoza Flores who gives the orders to block people’s movement through the property. However, although the former police officer is identified by SUNAT as the owner of the Hotel Boutique Atenas, he does not appear in the public property records of any of El Refugio’s 11 subplots.
The sequence of events surrounding the transfer of this property among various owners is important to this story, but before diving into that, there’s another issue causing concern for environmental authorities.
A hotel built without permits
Peru allows certain commercial activities in reserve buffer zones, but only if they don’t harm the reserve. Projects and buildings within a buffer zone must take into account the technical opinion of SERNANP, the protected areas agency. In this case, SERNANP told Mongabay Latam that it had never authorized the construction of the Hotel Boutique Atenas.
Silvana Baldovino Beas is a lawyer and expert on protected areas and the director of the nonprofit Peruvian Society for Environmental Law, known as SPDA. According to her, in order to block a project, SERNANP would need to identify whether it “violates or affects the goal of conserving the protected area, and explain why a project should not be completed in that space.”
According to Fernando Quiroz, the director of the Paracas National Reserve, when buildings do not have SERNANP’s approval, the agency informs an arm of the national police specialized in environmental crime so that it can verify this. SERNANP would then send a report to the Public Ministry of Peru. It also requests information from the mayor’s office, municipality or regional government about any licenses granted. However, SERNANP does not always receive an answer from the police, which is what happened in this case.
In March 2023, SERNANP sent a report about the hotel’s construction to the Provincial Environmental Prosecutor of Ica, a department in southern Peru, but so far SERNANP has no knowledge of how the case has progressed, the agency told us. Mongabay Latam asked the environmental prosecutor’s office whether a case had been opened, but it declined to provide any information.
SERNANP had already taken steps in 2022 to block the construction of infrastructure being built without its authorization. In January that year, SERNANP rangers found several people apparently working for the Hotel Boutique Atenas building a staircase to connect the narrow beach to the top of the cliff astride Paracas Bay, an important access point, according to a SERNANP report seen by Mongabay Latam.
“When park rangers approached the area, they found three people who — at that moment — were building the staircase, and when they noticed that the park rangers were there, they stopped building,” the report says.
The following month, in February 2022, SERNANP sent a letter to Paracas then-Mayor Rosario Isabel Ramírez Gamboa requesting information about construction licenses. There was no response, so SERNANP followed up on April 13 and again on June 22.
On March 6, 2023, after a change in mayor, SERNANP wrote an urgent letter to Omar Bohórquez Huertas, the current mayor, requesting that his office provide details on the existence of authorization titles and permits for the execution of infrastructure projects. Again, the agency said, it received no response.
After five unanswered letters from SERNANP to the municipality of Paracas, and without authorization from SERNANP, the Hotel Boutique Atenas announced in 2023 that it would open its doors to all guests through the travel website Booking.com.
Mongabay Latam also contacted the municipality of Paracas regarding the documents sent by SERNANP, but there was no response.
The fact that the construction of the hotel did not take SERNANP’s technical opinion into account implies that its environmental impact on the area has not been evaluated and that — for example — it is not known how the hotel treats its water. This causes concerns for the scallop farmers, because 99% of their scallops are exported. The success of their business, however, depends on their ability to comply with the requirements of the National Fisheries Health Agency (SANIPES).
“During an inspection, everything is reviewed in great detail. Almost all of what we harvest is for export, and we must comply with the safety standards that we are given,” said a marine farmer interviewed by Mongabay Latam, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “If all of the projects at El Refugio are carried out, they would also need to be under continuous inspection, with plans for environmental impact and pollution, so that we can keep working,” the marine farmer said.
There are a total of 34 concessions for the production of these mollusks on the Paracas Peninsula, where El Refugio and the Hotel Boutique Atenas are located. However, several marine farmers have left after growing tired of fighting for their right to remain in the area.
In fact, in the ocean directly in front of the hotel, two public universities — St. Aloysius Gonzaga National University (in Ica) and the National Agrarian University (in Lima) — have concessions until 2025. Their previous owner, a mariculturalist who clashed with the owners of El Refugio for several years, decided to transfer them for scientific use.
“I’m surprised by the inaction, the lack of urgency, the lack of initiative to protect the environment,” said Juan Carlos Ruiz Molleda, the constitutional litigation coordinator at the Legal Defense Institute, a civil society group.
According to Ruiz Molleda, Peruvian authorities must take action on several fronts: On one hand, SERNANP could file a protective order. The lawyer explained that the Constitutional Court has already stated that when creating a protected natural area, there must be certainty that the projects to be built do not violate the principles behind the creation of a protected area. This comes before granting ownership of any properties. He added that an environmental impact study should be required and that a criminal investigation should be filed.
The sophisticated ownership process for El Refugio
The land that El Refugio sits on once belonged to ENAPU, the national ports company.
General San Martín Port was built in 1969 in that area, at the tip of the Paracas Peninsula. Upon the creation of the Paracas National Reserve in 1975, the space around the port was left out of the protected area but classified as a buffer zone.
In 1969, the Peruvian government officially registered this property as its own. In 1985, it transferred it to ENAPU.
However, in 1994, with a decision from the Agroindustry Department of the Libertadores-Wari Region, the property was awarded to Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture, creating a duplicate registration entry. This means that the property was registered in the names of both the Ministry of Agriculture and ENAPU.
The following year, in March 1995, businessman Luis Atilio Humberto Francisco Corbetto Rossi took possession of El Refugio, which allowed him to use the property without owning it. However, this possession was provided by the Ministry of Agriculture under the condition that, for two years, the land would be used for agriculture.
However, after just one year, in March 1996, Corbetto Rossi requested a land use change from agricultural to urban. The Provincial Municipality of Pisco granted his request.
Later, as a married couple, Corbetto Rossi and real estate agent María Laura Peschiera Fernández went to civil court to obtain ownership of the land. They did this through a legal proceeding with the goal of authorizing the ownership of a property before a judge. In 2000, the Specialized Civil Court of Pisco declared Corbetto Rossi and his wife the owners of El Refugio.
The judge’s decision changed the situation for the couple because, as owners, they no longer needed to comply with the agriculture ministry’s conditions that had ordered that the land be set aside for agricultural use.
Two months after that ruling, ENAPU requested a nullification from the civil court because it had not been notified. However, before this was resolved, in June 2001, Corbetto Rossi sold El Refugio to Julio César Girao Olaechea — a lawyer — for 30,000 soles (under $8,000).
The trial between ENAPU and Corbetto Rossi lasted seven years and ended in the businessman’s favor.
ENAPU appealed that ruling and lost. The number of owners of El Refugio increased gradually.
Regarding how the transfer of land occurred, “It’s one thing for it to be legal, and it’s another thing for it to be correct,” said Baldovino Beas, the nonprofit lawyer.
“It is very common, on the issue of land, to use all of the mechanisms that the law provides to take possession of properties,” he added. “Here, they have used legal knowledge to acquire property — even knowledge of ENAPU’s weaknesses. Generally, there are people who know where these properties are [and] who tell you, ‘This property is available,’ or ‘You can [acquire] this property [through prescription].’”
In 2012, Julio César Girao Olaechea, the new owner of the property, requested that the municipality of Paracas divide El Refugio into 11 subplots, naming them in alphabetical order from A to K. In the following years, these pieces of land were bought and sold several times. These transactions involved a yacht club and real estate entrepreneurs, some of whom had criminal records for the “usurpation” of other properties, and some had even participated in trials linked to corruption. However, in 2017, the pieces of land that had not yet been sold returned to the hands of Corbetto Rossi and Peschiera Fernández after Julio César Girao Olaechea donated 60% of his property to them. This included seven plots, including Subplot J, where the Hotel Boutique Atenas was built. According to records, this plot is 40% owned by Girao Olaechea and 60% owned by Corbetto Rossi and Peschiera Fernández.
Why was a large portion of El Refugio returned in the end, free of charge, to Corbetto Rossi and Peschiera Fernández? When consulted about this, Girao Olaechea told Mongabay Latam that the motive was purely personal and private.
Real estate activity was hardly visible at El Refugio until 2016. With the exception of the wooden fence that was installed to prevent scallop farmers from entering, the area was a tranquil piece of coastal land, right next to the Paracas National Reserve. Things began to change in 2017, when the wooden fence was replaced by a concrete wall.
There are at least four open criminal proceedings for the alleged crime of “landscape alteration” due to work involving machinery and the destruction of cliffs at El Refugio. Mongabay Latam confirmed that Girao Olaechea is being investigated in one of them. There are also two proceedings against representatives of the company Rústica, a chain of restaurants and bars that has announced it will open a hotel in the area.
An invasion of boundaries
El Refugio’s 11 registration entries reveal that the owners have tried to expand their subplots using “area verifications” to obtain an additional 500-6,000 square meters (5,400-65,000 square feet). ENAPU, the owner of the adjacent pieces of land, has opposed this.
Although El Refugio has not been expanded legally, in practice, according to ENAPU, it has been done anyway. This was stated in the usurpation trial that began after the scallop farmers were displaced in 2021. During that trial, ENAPU reported the invasion of its property, pointing to Corbetto Rossi and Girao Olaechea — the owners of most of the property — as the responsible parties.
“Defendants Julio César Girao Olaechea and Luis Atilio Humberto Francisco Corbetto Rossi, along with a large group of unknown individuals, violently invaded the plot called ‘Remainder Area #3’ with heavy machinery, [such as] backhoes, destroying all of its boundaries and structures that were there, before laying concrete blocks in the shape of a wall,” reads the description of the investigative file for the invasion of ENAPU’s land.
The “private property” signs that were placed where the marine farmers had settled — in addition to tracks left by the backhoe and destroyed boundary posts that belonged to ENAPU — allegedly served as evidence of this.
According to Girao Olaechea, ENAPU “has always wanted to take” his land, and he claims that since “it has not been able to reach its goal through the civil route, it is now resorting to the criminal route.” He also told Mongabay Latam that ENAPU has sought the administrative closure of his electronic record, or property title, “after the judiciary [of Peru] declared my registration valid in a ruling.”
When asked about the reports of displacements by armed individuals, Girao Olaechea claimed to have no knowledge of them, although he said, “there are constant confrontations between marine farmers in the area.” According to Olaechea, “many of them, [whether] they are illegals or taking advantage of legally granted concessions, misuse coastal properties, destroying cliffs to gain land and convert it into beaches and to build illegal camps.” He added: “It is known that, in the area, there are gangs of ‘pseudo-extractors’ or fishers, whose only goal is to seize the properties. These situations were brought to the attention of SERNANP and the Peruvian National Police, but these entities have never done anything about it.”
ENAPU’s trial against Corbetto Rossi and Girao Olaechea for the alleged crime of “aggravated usurpation: alteration or destruction of boundaries” has not concluded and is under review in the Superior Court of Justice.
The prosecutor’s accusation, which had already been presented within the trial, included a request for a five-year sentence against Corbetto Rossi and Girao Olaechea, in addition to a civil reparation payment of 5,000 soles (just over $1,300) and the return of 22,462 m2 (242,000 ft2) of usurped land.
‘Eco-friendly’ developments
According to SERNANP records, in the Cequión-Atenas zone, the area of the reserve that one must cross to reach El Refugio and the Hotel Boutique Atenas, there are blue-footed boobies (Sula nebouxii), coastal miners (Geositta peruviana), guanay cormorants (Leucocarbo bougainvillii), Chilean flamingos (Phoenicopterus chilensis), Peruvian pelicans (Pelecanus thagus), ringed storm petrels (Oceanodroma hornbyi), Inca terns (Larosterna inca) and Peruvian terns. All of these birds appear on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List.
“Peruvian terns are very small birds — about the size of a swallow — that nest in that area, west of the peninsula, in the hills,” said Carlos Zavalaga Reyes, a marine biologist and researcher from Peru’s Scientific University of the South who specializes in birds.
According to the researcher, the Peruvian tern is one of the rarest marine species in Peru. Along with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Zavalaga Reyes investigated the effects of vehicle traffic on this bird species. He discovered that this species’ largest colony is in Paracas, but it is so vulnerable that he only found about 40 nests. The road to the General San Martín Port, which leads to the Hotel Boutique Atenas, crosses directly through the birds’ colony.
“This area already has industrial traffic due to the General San Martín Port, and increasing it a little more due to hotel activities could very well impact the birds. It will need to be evaluated, but vehicles are going to travel through the colony — they will definitely do so,” Zavalaga Reyes said.
An annotation citing Zavalaga Reyes’ research was added to the National Forest and Wildlife Service of Peru (SERFOR)’s Red Book. It states that recreational activities, fishers’ and tourists’ cars that enter off-trail areas, the use of water from wetlands for irrigation and the conversion of deserts into agricultural land are the main threats these birds face.
“Humans bring disturbances to uninhabited places — along with them come dogs, cats and rodents, although there is talk of ‘rustic buildings’,” he said. “I see kayaks, canoes and umbrellas there. The buffer zone is no longer a ‘buffer’ because its function is to protect the reserve from human presence, but there is direct human activity with a large impact.”
In addition to the Hotel Boutique Atenas, two more establishments have been built in the buffer zone. One of them is a well-known restaurant and inn, while the other is a home located on Punta Ripio.
According to José Carlos Silva Macher, a specialist in ecological economics, “All of these real estate and hotel complexes need to make commitments to the social and ecosystemic communities that they affect, and stop thinking that this is a task for low-ranking officials who may not monitor so much.”
Zavalaga Reyes and Silva Macher both agree that for a project to be “eco-friendly,” not only should solar panels and color-coded separate waste bins be considered, but there must also be honesty about how the project will impact the functioning of an ecosystem.
Sound pressure in the environment causes physiological stress for species. According to these experts, other consequences can also occur, such as decreased populations.
In addition, “ringed storm petrels are very susceptible to light,” Zavalga Reyes said. “When there is a lot of light around their colonies, they are attracted to it and become disoriented, and they fall down like insects. Many disoriented ringed storm petrels can come to these hotel areas, especially during times or on days when there are these large parties with powerful lights and loud noises, which can harm them. And there are other direct impacts on the birds that rest in the coastal area.”
Those involved with the Hotel Boutique Atenas do not appear to have considered these factors when they built the hotel, nor when they built a pier for guests to enjoy, and much less when they held their festival. The other two structures built on the Paracas Peninsula are in the same situation. Because they are all informal, none of them are even inspected.
Mongabay Latam tried to gather testimonies from Luis Atilio Humberto Francisco Corbetto Rossi, María Laura Peschiera Fernández and Sandro Espinoza Flores, but none of them responded by the time of this article’s original publication in Spanish.
Article by Karen de la Torre, Michelle Carrere, Alexa Vélez and Vanessa Romo.
Banner image: The Hotel Boutique Atenas. Image by Gerardo Marín.
This story was reported by Mongabay’s Latam team and first published here on our Latam site on Jul. 31, 2024.