Cerro Chapala Airport

The closure was not due to a specific incident, military conversion, or official mandate. It was a de facto closure resulting from abandonment and lack of use. Small, private airstrips in remote areas like this are often closed for economic reasons, such as the high cost of maintenance relative to their limited utility, or a change in ownership or purpose of the surrounding land.

The site is an abandoned airstrip. The outline of the ~4,000-foot runway is still clearly visible from the air, but it is no longer suitable for aviation. The surface is overgrown with desert scrub, eroded, and crossed by numerous vehicle tracks. The area is now used informally by off-road vehicles and as a local access path. There is no remaining aviation infrastructure, such as hangars, fuel, or buildings, on the site.

Cerro Chapala Airport was a small, rudimentary general aviation airstrip. Its primary purpose was to provide air access to the extremely remote central desert of Baja California, near the Laguna Chapala dry lake. It likely served a handful of purposes: supporting local ranches ('ranchos'), facilitating mining or geological exploration, and providing a landing spot for recreational aviation, tourism, and support for off-road racing events like the Baja 1000, which frequently uses the Laguna Chapala area as a course checkpoint. Operations would have been restricted to small, rugged, single-engine aircraft (like Cessnas or Pipers) capable of landing on a short, unimproved dirt runway.

There are no known plans or prospects for reopening Cerro Chapala Airport. Its remote location, lack of infrastructure, poor condition, and the availability of a larger, paved military airstrip in the town of San Quintín (San Quintín Military Airstrip, MMsq) make its redevelopment for any formal aviation purpose highly improbable. Any future investment in aviation for the region would be concentrated on the main San Quintín airstrip.