Reunion golf club professional#

“But there’s nothing else left there,” said Villavicencio. One of those owners is his aforementioned friend, Martin Modai, whose house remains intact. He hasn’t been able to go back – only property owners have. You couldn’t contemplate what was happening,” Villavicencio said. He was aware of what was happening, but the true measure of the devastation didn’t hit him until he began receiving pictures via WhatsApp. When it did, Villavicencio was about 45 minutes away, at his sister’s house. But that in itself got washed away in a minute.” “The golfers that played there on the PGA Tour Latinoamérica certainly enjoyed the volcano always saying 'hi' in the morning, making a boom sound and stuff like that. Heavy ash clouds, but never, never any pyroclastic material or lava flowing down. “In the five years I was director of golf there, we had three evacuations. “There were always eruptions,” said Navarro, who is originally from Mexico but moved to Guatemala when he was hired at La Reunión in 2013. More than something that was feared, the volcano, which hadn’t had a strong eruption since the 1970s, was part of the resort’s charm. A lot of time you would see the smoke, but you never actually believed it was going to happen.” “You would just hear it bang,” Villavicencio said. Minor volcanic activity was a daily occurrence. He even won a couple of tournaments there. He would take his family and stay with a friend who owned one of the properties on site. In the nearly 10 years it was open – the club was set to celebrate its 10th anniversary last November – he came back to La Reunión as often as he could. Villavicencio was one of the first to play Fuego Maya, before there were even tee or yardage markers.

It also hosted the PGA Tour Latinoamérica’s Stella Artois Open from 2014-18. The club staged local events and national-ranking tournaments for Guatemalan amateurs. I’ve been to golf courses all over the world and I’ve never been in a place that felt that way.”

Reunion golf club professional#

“La Reunion, when it started, was a very ambitious project, with this vision to create a golf course in the middle of the volcano,” said Alejandro Villavicencio, a 39-year-old former professional who had his amateur status reinstated in 2010 and continues to represent Guatemala in international amateur play. Members and guests played an estimated 7,000 rounds per year at La Reunión, one of just seven golf courses in Guatemala.

The stunning Pete Dye design, named Fuego Maya, was kept in pristine condition and featured 200 meters of elevation change. Ninety percent of the workers in the club lived in those two towns. “People lost their lives, and others lost their way of life,' Navarro explained at the Latin America Amateur Championship, where six Guatemalan golfers whom he coaches are in the field. In the addition to those who lost their lives, other local residents lost their livelihoods when La Reunión was destroyed by dirt, ash, mud and lava rock. The third – El Porvenir – was spared, but all three areas have been deemed a high-risk zone by the Guatemalan government. Two of the three towns that bordered La Reunión and sat at the base of the volcano – San Miguel Los Lotes and El Rodeo – were devastated. “The government says it’s 200, but it’s more than that.” “Obviously, it all comes down to loss of life,” said Navarro, seven months after the tragedy. Hundreds more remains technically missing, but local community groups have told news outlets the real number is in the thousands. On June 3, 2018, the Volcán de Fuego began a sudden volcanic eruption that officially claimed the lives of at least 194 people in Southern Guatemala. “And then,” Navarro remembers, “I got the text that there was lava flowing on hole 16.” “Yeah, the problem has been resolved,” he was told. A few hours later, he called back to see if the situation had been resolved. Navarro, the director of golf at La Reunión Golf Resort located just outside of Antigua, fielded a call from the club, where a group of golfers were asking for a discount on their green fees. LA ROMANA, Dominican Republic - Mario Navarro was in Houston when he got the call.Īlthough the family makes its home in Guatemala, the Navarros were all in Texas, where their 7-year-old daughter, Ada, was undergoing treatment for medulloblastoma, a brain tumor. “Mother Nature was cruel.” - Mario Navarro, the director of golf at La Reunión Golf Resort, on the Jvolcano that devastated his community in Guatemala.