A free photography exhibition documenting marine pollution inside one of the world’s most important gray whale breeding grounds opens Friday, April 24 at 6 p.m. in Tijuana’s Centro Cultural Tijuana (Cecut). The Tijuana photo exhibit, titled La desventurada contaminación de un paraíso (“The Unfortunate Contamination of a Paradise”), uses images from Playa Malarrimo and Laguna Ojo de Liebre to confront a question that extends well beyond a gallery wall: how one of Baja California Sur’s most protected ecosystems keeps filling with trash.
Laguna Ojo de Liebre: UNESCO Site, Whale Nursery, Trash Magnet
Laguna Ojo de Liebre sits roughly 700 kilometers south of Tijuana, near the town of Guerrero Negro in Baja California Sur. Each winter, between December and April, an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 gray whales travel roughly 10,000 kilometers from Arctic feeding grounds off Alaska and Russia to calve in the warm, shallow waters of the lagoon and neighboring San Ignacio Lagoon. The migration is one of the longest of any mammal on Earth.
UNESCO designated the El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, which encompasses both lagoons, as a World Heritage Site in 1993. The reserve covers 2.5 million hectares of desert, coastline, and marine habitat. Mexico’s federal government had already declared Ojo de Liebre a whale refuge in 1972, making it one of the country’s earliest marine protected areas.
Yet the lagoon’s neighbor, Playa Malarrimo, tells a different story. The beach sits along the Pacific coast just west of the lagoon and has long been known as one of the worst debris accumulation points on Baja’s peninsula. Ocean currents in the North Pacific Gyre funnel floating waste toward this stretch of shoreline. Fishermen, beachgoers, and researchers have reported everything from plastic bottles and fishing nets to entire shipping containers washed ashore over the decades. The debris does not originate locally. It arrives from across the Pacific, carried by the California Current and circular gyre patterns that treat Malarrimo as a natural collection basin.
Photographer Manuel Cruces Camberos, who has previously exhibited at Cecut, the Centro Estatal de las Artes, and Tijuana’s Instituto Municipal de Arte y Cultura, spent time documenting this accumulation. His images show the contrast between the lagoon’s ecological importance and the industrial and oceanic waste piling up on adjacent shores.
Exportadora de Sal Operates Inside the Biosphere Reserve
The exhibit also raises concerns about Exportadora de Sal (ESSA), a salt production company that has operated evaporation ponds near Guerrero Negro since the 1950s. ESSA is jointly owned by the Mexican government and the Japanese trading firm Mitsubishi Corporation. The company produces roughly seven million metric tons of salt per year, making it one of the largest salt works in the world.
In the late 1990s, ESSA proposed expanding its operations to build a new salt plant at San Ignacio Lagoon, directly inside prime whale calving habitat. The proposal drew fierce international opposition from conservation groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and Mexican organizations like Grupo de los Cien. In 2000, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo canceled the San Ignacio expansion, citing environmental concerns. The decision became a landmark moment in Mexican conservation history.
ESSA’s existing operations near Guerrero Negro continue, however. Environmentalists have raised ongoing questions about brine discharge, dust from salt piles, and the industrial footprint inside the biosphere reserve. Cruces Camberos includes the salt operation as one of several environmental pressures on the lagoon ecosystem.
Free Exhibition at Cecut Runs in the Vidal Pinto Corridor
The exhibition opens April 24 at Cecut’s Pasillo de la Fotografía Vidal Pinto, a dedicated photography gallery space within the cultural center on Paseo de los Héroes in Tijuana’s Zona Río. Admission is free. Cecut, which opened in 1982 as part of a federal effort to build cultural infrastructure along the border, remains one of northwestern Mexico’s most visited cultural venues, drawing both local and cross-border audiences.
Cruces Camberos received his first camera at age five and began formal training at 14 using equipment inherited from his father. His recent work has focused on Tijuana’s jazz scene, but this exhibition marks a return to environmental documentary photography.
The whale season at Ojo de Liebre typically ends in mid-April, so the exhibit arrives just as the last mothers and calves begin their northward migration. CONANP, Mexico’s national protected areas commission, manages the reserve and regulates tourist access to the lagoons during whale season. The next calving season begins in December 2025. The source for this report is La Jornada Baja California.