Mexico

19 records, two of them written, and the country where the law does most of the work this register measures.

Mexico holds its shore in federal hands. The zona federal marítimo terrestre runs twenty metres above the high tide line and belongs to the state, which means no resort in this country owns its beach — whatever the description says. Las Ventanas holds a closed estate from the Transpeninsular highway down to the sand with thirty privately owned residences inside the line; Esencia holds fifty acres of jungle behind five hundred metres of one of the last undeveloped stretches on the Riviera Maya.

Esencia's claim is negative and, on that coast, the strongest kind: the ground is worth what it is because the neighbours built and this estate did not. Its keys have roughly doubled since 2014, which the register records alongside the acreage, because a holding filling up is a different proposition from one that is not.

Seventeen of the nineteen records here are unwritten, and the country reads thin as a result. What is already visible is that Mexican acreage is usually published and usually needs a second sentence.