Sánchez Magallanes

Located in the far northwest of the municipality of Cárdenas 93 km from the municipal seat, the full name of the town is Coronel Andrés Sánchez Magallanes. It has an altitude of ten meters above sea level. The town is one of the municipality's 25 "regional centers of social and economic development." The patron saint is honored from the 24th to 26 July with religious activities as well as sporting and cultural events, a beauty pageant and exhibition of regional products. An Oyster Fair is held in conjunction with the other festivities. According to scattered archeological evidence, the area was occupied at least as far back as the Mayan era. According to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Juan de Grijalva, and Hernán Cortés passed an indigenous settlement here, then called Ayagualulco or Agualulco. Sometime after Spanish domination, the town became known as Barra de Santa Ana. According to oral tradition, there are two reasons why the Spanish community was called Barra de Santa Anna. The first states that during the 19th century, a devout woman from the city of Campeche donated a statue of Saint Anne to the community. The second states that a shipwrecked man on the point of drowning here pleaded to the saint to save him and by miracle he survived. He then donated an image of Saint Anne to the fishermen who saved him. The current name was declared in 1909 by state Governor Abraham Bandala in honor of Coronel Andrés Sánchez Magallanes, who fought against the French in the 19th century. The community was declared a town and port in 1964 by Governor Carlos Alberto Madrazo Becerra. ==Geography and environment==

Sánchez Magallanes is located on a small peninsula which has the Gulf of Mexico on its north side and the Del Carmen Lagoon to its south. This strip of land is still called the Barra de Santa Anna. In the 1990s, various studies warned that the Tabasco coastline was fragile and vulnerable to erosion by storms. However, neither the federal or state governments have taken action to build sea walls or take other preventative measures. The Sánchez Magallanes area is the most vulnerable because of the lagoons separated from the Gulf by only meters wide strips of land. Damage to these lagoons cause economic hardships to both fishing and agriculture. A study in 1998 by the Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco stated that economic activities such as farming and grazing, construction and lack of planning had produced grave environmental damage in the coastal areas of Sánchez Magallanes. Construction of the coastal highway in the 1970s provoked the disappearance of dunes, allowing waves to come further onshore during storms. Waves during storms now can reach the inland lagoons and causing higher salinity in the ground and water, killing plant and animal species. The manatee and pejelagarto fish have disappeared and oyster production has diminished. During the 2009/2010 winter storm season, there was severe damage to the beaches, mangroves and residential areas from here to Paraíso. This included flooding of the Del Carmen-Pajonal-Machona lagoon system, which damaged 104 houses and eroded three km of beaches. In 2010, the state employed foreign experts, principally from the Netherlands to study the erosion problem. ==Economy==

The local economy is heavily dependent on fishing even though there is some, farming, livestock, tourism and petroleum production. Fishing in the area includes sea bass, shark, crab and oysters some of which is exported to Japan. There are eleven cooperatives farming 10.5 hectares in the Del Carmen-Pajonal-Machona lagoon area. These cooperatives recently received 300,000 pesos to help with the rehabilitation of these farm areas as well as help with the promotion of the oysters produced. The program is slated to help 950 families which are dedicated to this activity. However, fishing in the area has had problems. Phenomena such as red tide can be devastating to fishing. Mexico’s oil company PEMEX began drilling in the wetlands areas around the peninsula in the 1960s, which has closed some areas such as the Chicozapote River and the El Yucateco lagoon to fishing because of pollution. Local residents complain that fish in the area can taste of oil and must fry it in order to get rid of the unwanted flavor. In 2005, PEMEX cleaned twelve tons of tar and other material contaminated by hydrocarbons from the beaches of Tabasco, including those of Sánchez Magallanes. Sánchez Magallanes is one of the beach areas regularly monitored for oil related pollution, especially before the vacation season of Holy Week. It is an area that the municipality promotes for tourism because of its beaches, the Del Carmen Lagoon and the El Pajaral Island, on which live a wide variety of bird species. The Ensueño del Trópico Water Park is located on the Gulf coast on a beach which is four km long and sixty meters wide. It has fine, white sand and warm, blue waters with gentle waves. The water is shallow up to fifty meters away from shore. ==References==