Not far from Hacienda de Cortes, Barbara Hutton, the ill-starred heiress to the Woolworth fortune, built in the late 1950's an estate called Sumiya, which she patterned after a Shogun mansion. She reportedly lived there for only three years, and for only two weeks each year.Part of the original estate is currently being subdivided and developed with big American-looking houses, as if it were an extreme suburb of Scottsdale, Ariz. Last November, the former Hutton house, with its low ceilings and shoji screen walls and wooden floors polished like glass, opened as the Camino Real Sumiya, with 163 Japanese-flavored guest rooms in three new buildings surrounding it.

Staying here would be a bit like staying at the Golden Door. There is the faintest piano music in the air, the sort you usually hear in massage rooms, the sort with no beginning and no end. The swimming pool, with its artfully placed boulders, has a superreal naturalness.

I had a steak sprinkled with chili powder on the sunny terrace of Restaurant Sumiya, the more starched of the two restaurants here; the view of the mountains was exceptional, as was the light breeze. The alternative is a bistro called La Arboleda, which overlooks what was Miss Hutton's private kabuki theater.

Aristoteles Sandoval, the former governor of Mexico’s Jalisco state, was killed in an attack in the tourist hotspot of Puerto Vallarta, the latest sign of worsening insecurity shaking Latin America’s second-largest economy.