Antonio Merlin watched from his living room window as the ocean inched closer to his home.
When the 55-year-old fisher built the concrete house with mosaic tile floors for his wife and four children in the village of El Bosque in 2002, the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico was nearly a kilometre away, a 15-minute walk from his back door.
But since 2019, residents of El Bosque say a series of severe weather fronts, bringing heavy rain and powerful winds, have been eroding the shoreline. As the ocean has encroached, more than 60 homes in the village have been destroyed by the waves. Among them was Merlin’s, which was overtaken by the sea in 2021.
“The idea that the sea would someday arrive at our door was unthinkable,” said Merlin, who has lived in the village since 1987. “Once the sea entered our homes, it began to knock them down one after another.”
In El Bosque, the ocean has wiped out more than half of the village’s homes, as well as the primary school, kindergarten and a main road. While Mexico is in the throes of multiple climate emergencies – from severe drought and water shortages in some areas to flooding and forest fires in others – El Bosque, with a population of 400 people, is its first recorded instance of a village overtaken by rising sea levels.
Further erosion of the shoreline and destruction of the village is inevitable in the coming months, according to climate experts from organisations such as Greenpeace and Conexiones Climáticas. El Bosque, which is located on a thin peninsula bordered to the east by the Gulf of Mexico and to the west by the Grijalva River, has been historically susceptible to hurricanes, though it has been the ferocious fronts in recent years that have devastated the village.
Experts say that in a year’s time, the entire village could be underwater.
“There is no way that the members of the community will be able to stay where they are now,” said Pablo Montaño, the general coordinator of the Mexican environmental activism group Conexiones Climáticas. “In the past year alone we’ve seen 30 metres of the shoreline disappear and the ocean overtake a block and a half of homes and the school.”
An aerial view of abandoned homes in El Bosque. Photograph: Pablo Montaño
Along the eastern side of El Bosque, the destruction of the village is clear as the foamy Gulf of Mexico tide crashes into remnants of decimated concrete homes and the fractured walls of the abandoned school. The one wall of the school that still stands displays the letters of the alphabet and a whiteboard with multiplication tables written on it.
After the tide reached the school last December, classes were moved across the street to a ramshackle zinc shack with dirt floors, where students’ classes have been reduced from full time to two one-hour lessons a week.
“It’s impossible for our kids to continue learning in conditions like this,” said Guadalupe Cobos as she surveyed the sand-covered desks in the shack.
Destroyed buildings on the shoreline
School furniture lies covered in sand in the school shack and, right, the remains of the old school building. Photographs: Adam Williams
Cobos, 46, who has lived in the village since 1986, says her children now commute to school in the town of Frontera, a 15-minute drive from El Bosque. “Not all the kids in El Bosque have this option,” she says. “So many no longer go to school at all.”
After the ocean swallowed Merlin’s home, he and his family took refuge in the village church, where they have been living since 2021. The family and the hundreds of other residents who lost their homes, are among a growing number of Mexicans displaced by the climate crisis.
“We are now migrants in our own country,” said Cobos. “The government says they will assist us with relocation, but we’ve been hearing that for years.”
Displaced residents of El Bosque. Photograph: Gustavo Graf/Pablo Montaño
In February and again in May, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was asked in his daily morning press conference about the government’s plans to provide housing for the residents of El Bosque. López Obrador, who is from Tabasco, in the same state as El Bosque, said the village’s emergency was “being attended to” by the government.
El Bosque’s inhabitants, however, are losing faith that help will arrive. They say they have been told by government agencies on multiple occasions that they will be relocated, but those assurances remain unfulfilled.
The Mexican government is “looking to offer an adequate housing alternative for the families affected by climate change” in El Bosque, the national housing commission, known as Conavi, told the Guardian by email.
A sign hangs on a line with the words ‘How do you imagine your home/school?’. Photographs: Conexiones Climáticas
Children’s drawings of houses hang on a line. Alongside the drawings are the words, in Spanish, ‘How do you see the sea?’
“Land is required to relocate the families,” Conavi wrote. “At this moment, a definitive location has not been defined and various options are being explored.”
Conavi said the federal, state and municipal government “will attend to the needs of the community”, adding that “the relocation process isn’t a linear or mechanical process where each of the steps is defined”.
In the meantime, residents of El Bosque live in fear that the next hurricane or major front of rain and wind will wash away the few remaining homes still standing.
“We might be the first community affected by rising sea levels in Mexico, but we won’t be the last,” Cobos said. “Climate change is in our homes, our streets and our schools. It’s here to stay, and it’s time for us to go.”
The tide laps trees and the remains of a building. Photograph: Gustavo Graf/Pablo Montaño
