Todos Santos has built its reputation on cobblestone charm, boutique galleries and a deliberate resistance to anything that smells like a strip mall. So when word got around that a national supermarket chain was breaking ground on a 3,500-square-meter lot at Santos Degollado and Agustín Olachea, in the San Vicente neighborhood, the reaction was less about grocery competition and more about how the whole thing got approved in the first place.
For the growing community of part-time residents and second-home owners who chose Todos Santos precisely because it isn’t Cabo San Lucas, this is the kind of story that hits close to home — literally. The town has spent years fielding questions about how fast it can grow before it stops being the place people fell in love with, a tension already visible in coverage of big development projects proposed for Todos Santos and the ongoing debate over the town’s urban development plan.
According to El Sudcaliforniano, the project is a large-format self-service store for the Chedraui chain, and the complaints started almost as soon as the bulldozers did. Anali Palacios, who owns a shop nearby, says the street has been closed for more than two weeks with no formal notice from the municipality of La Paz, Municipal Traffic authorities or Protección Civil, the state’s civil protection agency. She says the closure blocks half her parking, has cut into her sales, and left some residents without water during the works — inconveniences she says others have quietly absorbed rather than risk a confrontation.
“The problem isn’t the store, or Chedraui, or the competition,” Palacios told the outlet. “The issue is how things are being done and how the permits were obtained.” She points out that local business owners face a long checklist of licenses just to renovate a storefront, while this project, in her telling, has skipped steps that would normally stop a homeowner cold. When she refused a request from the Todos Santos delegado, the town’s municipal representative, to move a trash bin without any formal notification, she says she started getting calls and visits from police — enough that she filed an amparo, a legal injunction Mexican citizens can use to block official action they consider improper.
The permit questions go deeper than a blocked driveway. Resident Roberto Palacios told the paper that four separate parcels — one zoned residential, three zoned commercial — were merged on August 11 under the town’s Programa de Desarrollo Urbano, or Urban Development Plan, the document that governs what can be built where and at what scale. He says the merger wasn’t even registered under the name of the development company behind the project, and that construction is proceeding under a grading and demolition permit rather than one matched to the size of the building now rising on the site. The zoning on file, he adds, describes a basic goods store and a supermarket — not the single large-format store with warehouse space that’s actually going up.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Todos Santos has already seen its share of friction over how fast the coastline and outskirts are being built out, from the fight over dune construction near the beach to broader anxiety about what a wave of new projects means for a town whose water, drainage and electrical systems were built for a much smaller population. Anali Palacios put the underlying question plainly: if a project this size wants to operate in Todos Santos, shouldn’t it also be required to invest in the drainage, water and electrical capacity needed to support it?
A municipal official cited by El Sudcaliforniano says the construction license is on the verge of being issued, which would presumably answer some of the paperwork questions even if it does little to calm residents who feel they were never consulted. For now, the store keeps rising, the street stays partially closed, and Todos Santos gets another test of a question it keeps circling back to: who actually gets a say in what this town becomes. Readers with businesses or property near San Vicente should keep an eye on municipal announcements from La Paz for updates on the construction permit and any changes to street access.
