Residential

What Hurricane Rachel Taught Us on the Costalegre

By Fernando Loría — Chief Executive Officer, Hurricane Solution · October 5, 2026

South of Cabo Corrientes, the Jalisco coast becomes long, open to the Pacific, and short on roads. This week, that stretch was split in two: the north, from Cabo Corrientes to Playa Pérula, under a Tropical Storm Watch, and the south, from Playa Pérula toward Barra de Navidad and Colima, under a Tropical Storm Warning. Rachel passed roughly 350 km (217 miles) from Cabo Corrientes and moved off to the west.

The Costalegre is home to some of the most beautiful villas and boutique hotels in the country, and also to some of the hardest properties to protect in time. I want to explain why, and what I would do with the lessons Rachel left behind.

In this article, I cover:

Why this coast deserves different attention than Vallarta or Manzanillo.
Why hurricane plans on the Costalegre need to start one level earlier.
The most important document in a villa's hurricane plan, which is almost never a technical one.
What protection works for the area's open architecture.

Why the Costalegre is different

I see three concrete reasons.

Recent history. The strongest hurricanes to make landfall in Jalisco in recent years did so here. Patricia came ashore near Cuixmala in 2015. Lidia, in October 2023, went from a tropical storm to a Category 4 in less than a day and made landfall near Las Peñitas, in Tomatlán, with sustained winds of 220 km/h (137 mph). Jova also hit this coast in 2011.

Exposure. Vallarta gets partial shelter from the bay and the mountains. The Costalegre faces the open ocean head-on. A clifftop villa in Careyes or a beach house in Pérula takes the wind and the surf with no natural barriers.

Isolation. Along many stretches, Federal Highway 200 is the only connection. Crews come from far away, materials run out quickly in nearby towns, and a single landslide can cut a community off for days. During Polo, a week before Rachel, landslides were already being reported on Jalisco roads.

This week, Jalisco media also singled out the municipality of La Huerta as one of the most exposed to Rachel's rainfall, and state Civil Protection sent 200 personnel and 40 vehicles to Puerto Vallarta and Cihuatlán as a preventive deployment.

On the Costalegre, the clock starts one level earlier

The National Weather Service defines a Tropical Storm Watch as conditions possible within about 48 hours, and a Tropical Storm Warning as conditions expected within about 36 hours. In a city, a hotel can treat the watch as a get-ready stage, because its suppliers, staff, and hardware stores are close by.

At a villa in Chamela or Tenacatita, that logic doesn't hold the same way. If the crew needs half a day to get there, if materials have to be brought in from another city, and if the highway can close with the first heavy rain, the real margin is much shorter than the one in the advisory.

That's why my recommendation for the Costalegre is to treat the watch as if it were the city's warning:

Under a watch: deploy protection over the most exposed openings, close the folding doors, clear out furniture, and secure fuel and water.
Under a warning: finish the full deployment and have staff sheltered before the gusts arrive.
Under a Hurricane Warning: protection should already have been in place well before.

The first anchor is an authorization

Of everything I've seen at remote properties, this is the lesson I repeat most often. Most preparedness failures at vacation villas aren't technical. The system is there and the staff knows how to use it, but no one starts because the owner is in another country, in another time zone, and the caretaker doesn't feel authorized to act without the owner's go-ahead.

To illustrate, here's a pattern that keeps repeating (an illustrative case, no names):

Two neighboring villas, both with glass walls facing the ocean and owners out of the country, get the same watch.
At the first, the caretaker has written instructions. He deploys the protection, closes the folding doors, brings in the lounge chairs, fills the backup generator's tank, and sends photos. Two people finish in one afternoon because the anchors are already in the façade and every piece is labeled and stored next to its opening.
At the second, the caretaker waits for the owner's call. By the time he finally starts, the wind is already blowing hard, and he decides to protect only the ground floor.
The storm passes far offshore. Even so, the second villa wakes up to water in the primary bedroom, which came in through the tracks of the second-floor folding door. The plumber and the flooring specialist take three days to get there because of a landslide, and in the heat, the moisture has already started to grow mold.

That's why I consider the most important document in a villa's plan to be the written instruction that states who makes the call, when the protection gets deployed, and that the staff doesn't need to ask permission to do it.

Open architecture, protection that disappears

Costalegre villas are designed to erase the line between the interior and the landscape: floor-to-ceiling windows, folding doors several meters wide, double-height spaces, palapas, and pools at the edge of the cliff. An owner who invested in that is not going to accept metal shutters on display all year long, and a system the owner won't accept ends up never being installed.

That's why, in this area, we look for protection that is nearly invisible when it isn't in use and that covers large spans when it's needed. One project taught us a great deal about size limits:

A hotel had a glass façade 14 meters (46 ft) tall.
No system on the market could guarantee protection with anchors spaced that far apart.
In about a year, our team developed, designed, and tested a system that met the 14 meters and was tested up to 22 meters in height.

That experience carries over to villas with double-height spaces and glass walls. For covered terraces and palapas, the goal changes: keep the wind from getting under lightweight roofs and lifting them, and keep horizontal rain from flooding the interior. There, a perimeter fabric enclosure usually works better than protecting each window separately.

The day after in a remote area

After a storm on the Costalegre, the most common outcome isn't total destruction but several small problems that grow because of the distance: moisture no one dries out because there's no power, a broken pane that lets rain in for days, a closed road that keeps anyone from getting there to check. The memory of Odile in 2014, when the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) reported that nearly all of Baja California Sur lost power at some point, helps put into perspective how long an outage can last across a large region.

A day-after plan should define:

Who inspects first, and in what order the openings get checked.
How damage is documented with photos before any cleanup.
How the protection comes down: rinse the salt off with fresh water, let it dry before storing, and label every piece.
Who gets called for repairs, and with what realistic arrival time.

Checklist: questions for the owner and the property manager

Does the caretaker have written authorization to deploy the protection and close up the house without waiting for my confirmation?
Are the anchors already installed in the façade, or will someone have to drill on the day of the warning?
Is the protection stored next to each opening, and is it labeled?
How many people does it take to install it, and how long does it take them?
Do we have fuel, water, and backup communications for several days?
Has the system been tested for the actual size of our openings, and under what file number?

In summary

The Costalegre, where Patricia and Lidia made landfall, was under a watch in the north and a warning in the south this week.
Because crews and suppliers are so far away, a watch here should be treated like a warning in the city.
The most common failure at villas is a failure to decide, and it's solved with a written authorization.
The area's open architecture needs protection that covers large spans and is nearly invisible the rest of the year.
The plan has to include the day after, because in a remote area small problems grow over time.

Rachel moved away, and the Costalegre came through this week in good shape. If you own a property here, I suggest using these days to write that authorization, count the pieces of your system, and time how long your staff takes to install it. They're three afternoon tasks that make a big difference in how the next storm turns out.