Isla Palenque is 400 acres, covered mostly with mature forests, lagoons and mangroves. It also has a highly varied topography, meaning that if you are in one corner of the island, experiencing its specific qualities, you don’t necessarily understand any other part of the island. This makes it a difficult island to get to know, but also one that rewards constant hiking.

But does saying that Isla Palenque is a highly varied landscape covering 400 acres actually mean anything to you? And when I say that we are going to build about 300 units (under 100 hotel rooms, and a little over 200 homes), for an overall density of 0.75 units/acre, do you really get a feel for how low a density that is, especially compared to almost every other resort out there? Unless you were trained in a specific field like planning, architecture, etc, and have alot of experience in it, probably not. Personally I find it useful to compare Palenque to other places I know in order to get an intuitive feel for its size and scale; Google Earth’s satellite imagery is an ideal means for doing this.

Below are two images of Palenque (illustrated master plan first, then a satellite image). Following those, you’ll see a number of satellite images, including well-known locations in several US cities, a couple of highly touristed resort locations in Mexico and the Caribbean, and finally a shot of a National Park and its well-known hotel. Every one of these images is at the same scale; hopefully after looking at all of these, and being able to compare Palenque to places that maybe you’ve been, you can get a feel for the scale of the island and low density of the project.

Isla Palenque Master Plan Rendering:

Isla Palenque Satellite Image:

New York City: southern end of Central Park; the image includes Columbus circle in the lower right and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the upper right.

Chicago: North half of the Loop, from the river out to the lake, including Millenium Park, the Art Institute, and part of Grant Park.

Washington, DC: National Mall, with both the Washington Monument and Capitol Building at right and left edges.

Miami: a stretch of Miami beach.

Puerto Vallarta: part of the marinas and Nuevo Puerto Vallarta; a couple of cruise ships can be seen at the right end of the image. Along the lower edge, you can see some ten of the string of high-end, insulated resorts that makes up Nuevo Vallarta, almost all of which each have more rooms than our total unit count.

The Bahamas: western half of Paradise Island. The Atlantis resort, with its 3000+ rooms, is in the center.  The rest of the island looks like a scarred industrial site, giving the island’s name a nice ironic twist.

Yosemite National Park: just a small chunk, with the famous Ahwahnee Hotel in the middle of the right side, and a host of other hotels and service areas sprinkled about. Now this is more our scale. (I’m not saying we’re National Park size, but the Ahwahnee has about 100 rooms, and there’s much to experience in this little slice of Yosemite.)

I hope this little “slide show” helps you get a better for the island and our project. Even for someone like me, who has been educated and/or working in the industry for about 20 years now, an exercise like this helps put things into perspective. Its one thing to have an intellectual understanding of 400 acres and 0.75 units/acre; its another entirely to begin to get a visceral feel for it.