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Across the southern spine of the Baja California peninsula, water is the rarest form of wealth. It flows quietly through canyons and palm groves, gathering in shallow basins that, for centuries, have made life in the desert possible.
Todos Santos is one of those improbable places, a town sustained by an oasis that locals call El Palmar, where the Río La Reforma meets the coastal lagoon of La Poza. From above, the contrast is striking: arid hills framing a lush green corridor of palms and orchards, a remnant of the fertile valley that once defined this community’s rhythm of work and celebration.
But the landscape is changing. According to a 2020 study by the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur, the oasis has lost more than half of its surface area in less than two decades. Between 2002 and 2019, its extension decreased by 51 percent; the lagoon shrank by nearly two-thirds.
For a town that owes its existence to water, such numbers are more than data points. They are a measure of fragility. The pressures of growth, agriculture, and tourism have begun to redraw the map of Todos Santos. What used to be open, communal ground has become fragmented, often fenced and dry.
Yet within that shift, a question emerges: how do you protect life in a desert without freezing it in time?
One proposal, born from the collaboration of architects, residents, and environmental researchers, seeks to answer that question through design. Called Las Veredas del Agua, it reimagines the oasis as a shared landscape, a public park that restores the paths to the river, the orchards, and the sense of belonging that water once provided.
The Global Rarity of Oases
Few landscapes embody resilience like an oasis. They begin as accidents of nature and endure as feats of human adaptation, shaped by the careful management of scarce water. From the date-palm groves of Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates to the terraced orchards of Elche in Spain, these places show how cooperation and restraint can turn aridity into abundance.
In the Americas, true oases are exceedingly rare. They occur almost exclusively along the Baja California Peninsula, where groundwater meets the sea and the desert briefly softens. Baja California Sur is Mexico’s driest state, yet it shelters the country’s only network of authentic oases, ecosystems that together represent less than one percent of its surface.
These are not isolated pockets of green but an archipelago of cultural landscapes formed by centuries of collective effort. Todos Santos is one of the most emblematic. Fed by the Sierra de la Laguna watershed, its palms, fruit trees, and traditional irrigation channels — the acequias misionales introduced during the Jesuit period — sustained generations of farmers and ranchers.
The oasis once functioned as a self-regulating system: water was distributed collectively, crops rotated with the seasons, and the rhythm of life was guided by the slow pulse of the river.
In the oases of Baja California Sur, the relationship between land and water was never left to chance. Each canal and orchard was part of an unwritten communal agreement — a system of shared responsibility that transformed scarcity into permanence.
Todos Santos — A Landscape and Its Memory
Long before Todos Santos drew new residents and visitors from afar, it was a valley of water. The network of acequias misionales that carried its water, built centuries ago, was more than an engineering feat. They were a social structure. Water flowed by gravity, but it depended on trust, on shared routines, and small negotiations between neighbors who understood that balance was essential for survival. Each harvest, each repaired gate or cleaned canal, reaffirmed a collective understanding of limits.
For generations, the oasis was a common ground for Todos Santos. People washed clothes there, celebrated, gathered under the palms. Every gesture was part of an ongoing social agreement written in irrigation channels, a pact between people and water that kept the desert alive.
That covenant began to fray when pipes replaced open canals, when farmland gave way to parcels, and when the link between land and care was strained. The river narrowed; the paths to it closed. What had been shared became fragmented, and with that, a quieter loss took hold: the erosion of memory.
Still, memory has its own tide. Las Veredas del Agua begins there, in the act of remembering by restoring. The project aims to make the oasis walkable again, reopen the old water paths, and transform recollection into a new form of stewardship.
Las Veredas del Agua — A Civic Design Vision
The idea of Las Veredas del Agua was born from observation rather than protest. When landscape architect Teresa Egea Molines moved to Todos Santos in 2017, she began studying the oasis not as scenery but as a system, a living archive of how people once lived with water.
What she found was a structure still intact beneath neglect: the river, the acequias, the abandoned orchards, the logic of shade and flow that once made the valley self-sustaining.
Her conclusion was simple but ambitious. The oasis could be protected only if it were used again, not as private land but as a shared landscape. From that insight came a plan for a public park spanning 5.2 square kilometers, following the course of the Río La Reforma to the La Poza lagoon.
The proposal, recognized with an Honorable Mention at the 2024 Latin American Landscape Architecture Biennial, outlines a linear park built around five layers:
- Restoration of the hydrological basin, reconnecting river, wetland, and infiltration zones.
- Revival of traditional agriculture, with native and heritage crops cultivated in cooperative form.
- Preservation of cultural heritage, including the Jesuit-era irrigation works.
- Sustainable mobility, creating a continuous eco-trail for pedestrians and cyclists.
- Resilient green infrastructure, designed to mitigate floods, droughts, and fire.
Its innovation lies as much in governance as in design. Egea envisions a local management system in which the community, private sector, academia, and government share responsibility, echoing the traditional public agreement of the acequias. The park must be more than a space; it must function as a mechanism for cooperation.
In this model, architecture is not decoration but mediation, a tool for dialogue between ecology and economy, between the town’s memory and its future. Las Veredas del Agua reimagines the oasis not as a relic to be preserved behind fences, but as a living system to be walked, cultivated, and governed together.
The Oasis as a Cultural Landscape
The proposal behind Las Veredas del Agua is grounded in a simple yet profound idea: the oasis embodies both nature and culture. Its value lies in how the landscape and its people learned to coexist.
Across the world, a few places have achieved this balance and gained recognition for it. Todos Santos belongs to that same lineage. Its acequias misionales are protected under Mexican law as hydraulic monuments, a sign that the town’s history is inextricably linked to its relationship with water.
However, seeking recognition for the oasis would not be a gesture of prestige but of continuity. The knowledge stored in its channels and orchards is part of Mexico’s living heritage and one of the few examples on the continent of a desert ecosystem that remains inhabited and productive.
In this sense, Las Veredas del Agua is an exercise in translation. It takes the inherited logic of collective care and turns it into contemporary design and governance. By doing so, it demonstrates how memory can evolve without being erased, and how a landscape can remain alive when used with intelligence and respect.
Shared Benefits
The creation of a public park in the oasis would reshape everyday life in Todos Santos. It would reconnect neighborhoods through safe pedestrian and cycling routes, open green spaces for recreation, and shaded paths where people could walk again along the river. The same landscape that once sustained crops could now sustain community.
For local residents, Las Veredas del Agua would restore access to a place that is part of collective memory. For children, it would become a classroom in the open air. For older generations, it would recover the routes of work and celebration that defined their youth. Visitors would experience something rare in Baja California Sur: a landscape that tells its story without being consumed by it.
The plan also carries practical gains. Restoring the riverbed and its vegetation would help reduce flooding during the rainy season and lower fire risk during the dry months. Reforestation and soil management would protect the aquifer that supplies the town, and the proposed market for local produce would create dignified work linked to sustainable agriculture.
Even the business community stands to benefit. A healthy oasis adds value to the town’s identity, strengthens its long-term appeal, and aligns local growth with environmental stability. What the project offers is not a restriction on development but a framework that makes it resilient.
Toward a Common Vision
The idea that runs through Las Veredas del Agua is simple and demanding. A landscape survives only when the people who inhabit it share a sense of responsibility for it. In Todos Santos, that principle once guided the irrigation channels that sustained the oasis. The project now seeks to renew that understanding in modern form.
By turning the oasis into a public park, Las Veredas del Agua proposes a renewed public agreement to cooperate. It invites the town to manage its natural and cultural resources collectively, through design rather than decree. The river, the orchards, and the wetland become a shared task again, cared for by residents, businesses, and institutions that recognize their dependence on the same water.
This is not an effort to return to the past, but to recover its wisdom. The old acequias were effective because they relied on trust and community participation. The new framework achieves the same goals, albeit with a focus on technical planning, environmental science, and civic collaboration.
If the project succeeds, Todos Santos will have achieved something larger than preservation. It will have shown that in the desert, resilience depends on community, and that progress can take the shape of care. In the end, Las Veredas del Agua is not only about retracing old paths; it is also about discovering new ones. It is about remembering that those paths were built to be shared.