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Tijuana
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TIJUANA
is
the
Mexican border town - with every virtue and vice that this implies. More than 36 million people cross the border every year - the vast majority of them staying only a few hours - so it can boast with some justification of being the "World's Most Visited City". Which is not to say it's somewhere you should plan to hang around; but if you want to stop off before starting the long trek south, Tijuana is certainly your most practical choice. There's no shortage of reasonable hotels, although as you'd expect, most things are far more expensive than they are further south.
Above all the town is geared towards dealing with hordes of day-trippers, which means hundreds of tacky souvenir stands, cheap doctors, dentists and auto-repair shops, and countless bars and restaurants, pricey by Mexican standards but cheaper than anything you'll find in San Diego. One thing you won't find much of any more - at least not anywhere near the centre of town - is the prostitution and the sex shows for which the border towns used to be notorious. This is partly the result of a conscious attempt to clean the city up, due in part to the changing climate in the US: indeed in many places, though not visibly here, the traffic now runs in the other direction with vast billboards on the American side of the border offering lurid invitations to "Total nudity - 24 hours a day". Tijuana does still thrive on gambling though, with greyhound racing every evening; jai alai from 8pm every night except Wednesday in the huge downtown Fronton Palacio; and bullfights throughout the summer (May-Sept) at two rings, one right on the coast, the other a couple of kilometres southeast of the centre. At the off-track betting lounges all around Tijuana, you can place money on just about anything that moves and monitor progress on the banks of closed-circuit TVs.
The parts of the city most tourists don't see fit less easily into expectations.
Modern Tijuana
is among the wealthiest cities in the Mexican republic, buoyed up by the region's duty-free status and by
maquiladora
assembly plants (raw or semi-assembled materials are brought across the border duty-free, assembled by cheap Mexican labour, and re-exported with duty levied only on the added value). How the NAFTA treaty affects this remains to be seen, but chances are it means further boom times for Tijuana's industrial zone. Downtown, beyond the areas where most tourists venture, the modern concrete and glass wouldn't look amiss in southern California. The flip side of the boom lies along the border, where shantytowns sprawl for miles: housing for the labourers and also, more traditionally, the final staging post for the bid to disappear north: from the coast, the city now stretches out for around 19km along the US border. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Mexico,
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