The Occidental Garden is a small open space for throwing parties for 200 guests. It is located next to Mexico's biggest lake, Chapala, and it has quite a view. The commision demanded minor infrastructural implementations for the events –services for the guests, an area to install a temporary kitchen, a handrail by the site's open-ended boundary overlooking the lake– and a landscape/gardening intervention. This work was taken as a pretext to study the historical/aesthetic roots of occidental Mexico, and how the founding of some of its major cities was related to the random conjunction of power and leisure.

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In the sixties, Hollywood founded the city of Puerto Vallarta when John Huston shot The Night of the Iguana* 'somewhere in the mexican coast by the Pacific Ocean'. The plot –first written as a short story, then adapted to the theatre, and finally adapted for the screen, all by Tennessee Williams– tells the adventures Rev. Lawrence Shannon lives as a touristic guide in Puerto Vallarta working for a thrid-class travel agency after being expelled from the Order for characterizing the Occidental image of God as a "senile delinquent" in one of his sermons. While shooting the film, Richard Burton (the actor playing Shannon) developed a romance with his then lover Elizabeth Taylor, and married in the seaside town. The media followed, and Puerto Vallarta was born. In 1970, mexican and american presidents Gustavo Diaz Ordaz and Richard Nixon hosted the opening of Puerto Vallarta's international airport. More recently, every spring break, transnational youngsters revisit Rev. Shannon's investigation in the cliff-like hotels that rise facing the Pacific ocean.

Analogously, in the first decade of the twentieth century, before the Vallarta phenomenon, Porfirio Diaz founded the lakeside town of Chapala when he chose as his salon d'été a modest fishermen's village in the mexican occident. Like the spring breakers, Don Porfirio visited the state of Jalisco on easter. Rich Guadalajara families followed the way, founded the Chapala Yacht Club, and built a road from the city to the lakeside town. In 1910 the Mexican Revolution broke out and Diaz exiled himself in Paris, where he would later die and be buried. Like Oscar Wilde.

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Jardin de Occidente: The intervention limits of the landscape project had to meet only two conditions: The view from the terrace to the lake should remain unobstructed, and enough space to install a tent  for 200 guests –by the lake– had to be left clear. Then the vegetation was disposed according to two scales: the public, spread through the site's bounding limits, and the private, a new, intimate space at the center of the garden delimited by flowery bushes.