During the waning days of World War II, pilot Luis Cóppola Bonillas found himself with some unexpected downtime. The Tucson, Arizona native was attached to the U.S. Eighth Air Force and had flown just under three dozen missions in his B-17 Flying Fortress, the aircraft responsible for more bombs dropped over Europe during the war than any other. Grounded one day in Greenland due to inclement weather, he had time to read a book.
The one he chose would change the course of his life and forever change the landscape of Los Cabos. Inspired by the Antonio de Fierro Blanco novel The Journey of the Flame, Cóppola had relocated to the Baja California peninsula by 1948 and was busily ferrying passengers in war surplus DC-3s as a pilot for the regional airline Trans Mar de Cortés. Over the next six decades, he would also help open (and own) some of the pioneering resorts in La Paz and Los Cabos during the birth of the tourist age and would play an important role in founding what is today the world’s richest fishing tournament.
‘The Journey of the Flame’ and the story of its mysterious author
What appealed to Cóppola about the book? That’s unknown, but he’s hardly the only person to revere it. My first Los Cabos landlord, for example, upon learning I was a writer, immediately asked for help in petitioning the publisher for a Spanish-language translation.
Certainly, no novel has ever captured the rich culture of the Baja California peninsula quite like The Journey of the Flame. First published in 1933, it opens with the 104th birthday celebration of its narrator, the flaming-haired Don Juan Obrigón, then flashes back to the journey he took as a 12-year-old boy, accompanying the Spanish viceroy from San José del Cabo to Monterey, California, circa 1810. Along the way, readers are treated to a succession of compelling episodes, generously punctuated with archaic and often delightful Spanish idioms, that allusively refer to important figures and events in the region’s history.
Amazingly, the novel’s backstory is every bit as colorful. Antonio de Fierro Blanco was a pen name, of course. The real author was Walter Nordhoff and his Baja bona fides were legit. His father, Charles B. Nordhoff had written a highly influential 1872 work about California (California: A Book for Travelers and Settlers), so his proposed follow-up on Baja California (Peninsular California) led the Mexican International Company to gift him with 50,000 acres of land near Ensenada. Walter was soon put in charge of that tract, which became Rancho Ramajal, an experience that would help to inspire his great Baja novel. Walter’s son Charles, meanwhile, would later become the family’s most famous author, co-writing The Bounty Trilogy with James Norman Hall.
The pioneer resorts of Los Cabos and the people Who built them
When Cóppola came to Baja California as the first pilot hired by nascent airline Trans Mar de Cortés, what is now the peninsula’s southernmost state, Baja California Sur (which wasn’t legally recognized until 1974), had about 60,000 residents and only one modern hotel: the Hotel Perla in La Paz. That would soon change. Cóppola and his wife Evangelina Joffroy bought the 12-room Hotel Los Arcos in 1952. It had opened two years previously, the same year Abelardo “Rod” Rodriguez and partner W. Matt “Bud” Parr premiered Rancho Las Cruces, and a year before Fisher House, the first modest inn in Los Cabos opened.
Partnerships would be a feature of many of the region’s early resorts. Rodríguez and Parr teamed up again for Hotel Palmilla in 1956, and Cóppola was a partner in Parr’s Hotel Cabo San Lucas, which opened at Chileno Bay in 1961, Luis Bulnes Molleda, the former Cabo San Lucas cannery manager, would get in on the act for Hotel Finisterra in 1972. But Cóppola was the driving force and principal owner of that stunning property. Bulnes would open his own Hotel Solmar two years later at Land’s End. These and Rodriguez’s Hotel Hacienda in Cabo San Lucas, that city’s first lodging in 1963, pioneered tourism in Los Cabos, setting the stage for the opening of the Transpeninsular Highway in 1973.
Before the highway was completed, building hotels was anything but easy. So opening two benchmark properties and expanding the Hotel Los Arcos to 182 rooms by 1976 were feats worth crowing about. As Cóppola remembered in a 1992 interview with Baja Explorer: “When Bud Parr and I built the Hotel Cabo San Lucas, we didn’t have a damn thing. There was nothing here. We had to load up boatloads of lumber and plants. We recruited carpenters from Manzanillo and boated them over here. We used to fly in our own people, supplies, and a lot of the materials for construction.”
The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and the birth of Bisbee’s Black & Blue
Photography for Sports Illustrated’s second Swimsuit Issue in 1965 took place in Baja California and the magazine published an accompanying article on emerging tourism in Los Cabos. Pioneering hoteliers Parr and Cóppola were each quoted, with the latter telling a colorful anecdote about the difference in attitude between local fishermen and those who visited.
“Señor, they are coming in with the boats and the motors and they go out and fish with a captain and two more men to help,” exclaimed a local boy, according to Cóppola. “And I said, ‘Well, this is great fishing down here,” and he said, ‘Yes, but they spend all this money to get maybe one marlin, and you know my father? My father, he goes out and gets 10 or 15 marlin in one day all by himself.’ I never could make that boy understand the ways of the North American.”
Cóppola did understand the importance of fishing to the early resorts in Baja California Sur and proved it in the early 1980s when he was instrumental in launching Bisbee’s Black & Blue marlin fishing tournament. His and Hotel Finisterra manager Bill Baffert’s impromptu meeting with Bob Bisbee’s Sr., then running a fuel dock on Balboa Island in Newport Beach, led to the inaugural tournament in Cabo San Lucas in 1982. The first purse was modest ( US $10,000) but by 2022 it had grown to $11.5 million, the richest ever offered by any fishing tournament.
The book for which Luis Cóppola was an inspiration
Cóppola passed away in 2008 and only one of his hotels remains open, the now Sandos-managed Finisterra. But his legacy still looms large and he and hoteliers Parr, Rodríguez, and Bulnes are honored by name at Plaza Pioneros in Cabo San Lucas.
Thus, his name will always be remembered in Los Cabos and forever associated with two great books about the Baja California peninsula: The Journey of the Flame and The Sea of Cortez. The latter, a bestselling travel book by Ray Cannon published in 1966, was enormously important in spurring tourism to the region. However, Cannon could not have written it without the help of Trans Mar de Cortés owner Mayo Obregón, who authorized pilots like Cóppola to take the writer wherever he wanted to go free of charge.
Naturally, Cóppola welcomed the duty. After all, who knew better the power of a good story?
Chris Sands is the Cabo San Lucas local expert for the USA Today travel website 10 Best, writer of Fodor’s Los Cabos travel guidebook, and a contributor to numerous websites and publications, including Tasting Table, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler, Forbes Travel Guide, Porthole Cruise, Cabo Living and Mexico News Daily. His specialty is travel-related content and lifestyle features focused on food, wine and golf.
