In 1986, the billionaire banker Sir James Goldsmith acquired some 20,000 acres of land on the Pacific coast of Mexico near Careyes and commissioned the architect Robert Couturier to build an enormous home, Cuixmala ("Soul Haven"), overlooking the sea.
The home was attended by as many as 400 servants, including a full-time "scorpion patrol" to keep the area's deadly scorpions away from the glazed-tile walls and moats bordering the property's many dwellings and driveways, and several hundred acres of gardens.
[Goldsmith, Couturier later recalled, "was the source of the whole region's economy."]
[Goldsmith had an intense phobia of rubber.]
Sources
Vanity Fair, Sept. 2002, p. 244
