Step into the lobby of Casa Bella, a charming boutique hotel located just across from the central plaza in downtown Cabo, and you’re greeted with access to the lovely interior courtyard and its lush landscaping, hacienda-style rooms, intimate pool area and central courtyard.

It’s an oasis of peace and tranquility, a small property by Cabo standards, about a dozen rooms and suites, and it’s an ideal retreat from the hustle and bustle taking place all around town, a place to relax and enjoy the personal hospitality of the staff and management.

Casa Bella is also the personal home of one of Cabo’s more prominent pioneers, Carlos Ungson, a quiet, personable man who is responsible for some of the earliest hotel projects of Cabo’s past - including the iconic Hotel Cabo San Lucas - and is now working on some new large-scale plans that will help define the area’s future.

Carlos Ungson has had a lifelong relationship with the Baja peninsula. His parents originally emigrated from China to Acapulco in 1895, and after several stops, moved to Los Mochis to work at the sugar plantations and refineries. They then relocated to Nogales and eventually settled in the Mexicali area of northern Baja, where Carlos was born. “Our family had eight children in all,” says Carlos. “We all went to a Chinese school that had been organized by Methodist missionaries who had left China when war between China and Japan broke out in 1932.”

At nine years of age, Carlos was sent to a private boarding school in southern California where he could develop his English and get a more thorough education.

An excellent student, Carlos was soon enrolled at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he received a degree in civil engineering. 

“After USC I went to work for an architectural and construction firm, who had a number of projects at the time,” he says. “They were involved in the Madonna Inn which was a project in central California, and also had jobs in Costa Rica, and with a southern Californian by the name of Bud Parr, who had big plans for a little-known area at the tip of Baja California. I decided to go to Baja, since I could speak Spanish. My whole life was changed with that decision.”

Carlos flew down to Los Cabos with his partner at the time, Alberto Tribolet. “The only way to the project site then was by air, and you could land at either San José del Cabo airstrip, or at the Palmilla,” Carlos says. “When I first saw the area from the air I said, ‘Where is it?’ wondering where the project could be. There was nothing to see.”

“We met with Bud Parr and he explained what his project was. He was building a hotel near Chileno Bay called the Hotel Cabo San Lucas. The site was located on a dirt road overlooking the water between Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo. He had purchased a large parcel of beachfront property in 1959, and wanted to put up a first class project, a true luxury hotel where he could bring high level clients and celebrities and share the Cabo experience with them.”

Parr immediately recognized the skills of young engineer Ungson, and asked him to move to the area and work on the project on-site. “It was a great concept, but there was only one problem - there was nothing there,” says Carlos. “Everything we needed to build a hotel would have to be fabricated in the area or brought in by boat and plane.”

Not an easy project for someone who had just stepped out of the halls of academe in southern California, but Carlos was energized by the challenge the Hotel Cabo San Lucas presented. Moving into a small hotel in San José del Cabo called Casa Fischer, Carlos had a bone-rattling hour commute to the project each way over rough washboard road. Organizing the efforts of some 200 local artisans and laborers, he coordinated the overall construction efforts, ordering shipments of raw materials from mainland Mexico and Ensenada and enlisting local industries to produce handmade tiles, furniture, sculpture and all the components that would appoint Bud Parr’s visionary new hotel.

“This was a complete adventure, like going to Africa or the Wild West. There was no power or communications. They were still running 1939 Ford trucks,” Carlos says. “We had to make everything onsite. We had machines to make the roof and floor tiles and built our own electrical and water supply facilities. We had to make everything from scratch. It’s hard to believe how primitive things were then, and how much we had to make ourselves. It was like going back in time, but it was so beautiful there.”

When the Hotel Cabo San Lucas opened it was modest in size, with 12 rooms, a kitchen, a restaurant and a bar. Swedish designer Noldi Schreck was brought in to provide all the interior designs, and Mexican artisans produced Mayan-inspired sculptures to add a touch of authentic history to the grounds. The Hotel Cabo San Lucas was a sparkling jewel spanning the cliffs overlooking the Sea of Cortez. Ideally positioned, it was to become a celebrity hideout, a place where the rich and powerful could come and kick off their shoes and enjoy the charms of the area.

As the Hotel Cabo San Lucas gained notoriety, its multi-tiered swimming pool became a favorite scenic setting for fashion photography shoots, including the Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions, and the hotel was eventually named one of the World’s Top 50 Tropical Resorts by Conde Nast magazine. What Parr had originally intended to be an exclusive club, a fun place to gather with people like friends Baron Hilton and Donald Douglas, continued to expand and become increasingly popular.

And for 15 years Carlos Ungson was there to make sure it met everyone’s expectations when Bud Parr made him General Manager in charge of day-to-day operations.

“It was a very good time then,” Carlos says. “We had a lot of celebrities, some of which were well known film stars, but when they stayed with us they acted just like everybody else. One guest who became my friend was the musician Jascha Heifetz. Every time the mariachis would begin to play he would have to leave because he was afraid it would hurt his ears.”

As Carlos took care of business operations at the hotel, he also began purchasing tracts of land that were off the beaten path, some around the marina in the village of Cabo San Lucas.

“At that time there were about 900 people in town, and almost everyone worked for the cannery. It was still a very primitive area,” Carlos says.

As the prominent General Manager of the hotel and an eligible bachelor, it wasn’t long before Carlos met and married a lovely young local Mexican girl named Maria Elena. As his family grew to include a young son and daughter, Carlos began thinking about leaving the hotel and starting his own business in real estate.

“I had a property next to the plaza in town, and decided to build a home there,” Carlos says. “After the home was built we decided to start a church and local business and opened the area’s first gift shop on the site. From there, things just started to grow, and I had visitors that came and stayed with me so I decided to add some rooms, and the hotel grew as a result of that.”

Casa Bella, the boutique hotel on the site of his original home, is one of the most charming smaller properties in the area, and is now managed by his daughter Barbara.

That leaves Carlos with plenty of time to work on other projects, several of which exceed even the complex growth that is currently underway in the Los Cabos area.

“I came up with an idea for a large housing complex that was to be suited to the many working class people in the area,” he says. “This is called Ciudad Satellite, a project located about four miles north of the airport in San José,” Carlos explains. “It’s designed to include all the necessities for a complete community. It will have parks and sports facilities, schools, retail shops, a city center, and all the facilities that a town would need for its citizens. This will be a community with private individual homes in a variety of styles, with up to four bedrooms. It will be a major contribution to the area’s working class people.”

The other Ungson project currently on the drawing boards is the proposed ChinaMex Mart complex that has been penciled in on a large parcel of land about 25 miles north of Cabo on the Pacific side of the coast.

“I had some business contacts who wanted me to get involved in a project that had already begun in Dubai. The Chinese government had a large expo built there to display all the export products of China to the markets in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. It is a huge facility, about the size of eight football fields, and even has an accurate replica of The Forbidden City included in the complex.”

If that seems overly ambitious or out of place for an area like southern Baja, consider that the Chinese have picked this location because it represents a perfectly-situated midway point for distribution from the Far East to points from Canada to the tip of South America.

This will be a massive, long-term project and create a lot of jobs for the area. In addition to the large expo hall, it will also incorporate five hotels, a full-sized convention center, a 36-hole golf course, a large retail complex with restaurants and entertainment and many other attractions included in a sprawling facility measuring five square kilometers.

“This will put Baja on the map as an international trading center. With the backing of the Chinese government, you can imagine the size of the investment in the area,” Carlos says enthusiastically.

With projects like that to his credit, you might think that Sr. Ungson would sit back a little and rest on his laurels, which have carried him from the beginning of the very earliest luxury hotels in the area, to what surely will be major contributions to the future of the area in both trade and local infrastructure. But he’s also working things closer to home that will help change the face of Cabo itself.