Roughly 70 miles east of downtown San Diego, in a high-desert town of about 700 people, sits a hotel with 500-year-old hand-carved doors from Morocco, three natural hot spring pools, and a silent soaking room where guests aren't allowed to speak. The Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel isn't just selling rooms — its owners bought most of the town around it, betting that a border community battered by decades of decline can be rebuilt around mineral water and quiet luxury.
Owners Jeff Osborne, Melissa Strukel and Corbin Winters first visited the property in July 2020, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune. Within roughly six years, they had purchased the hotel and 155 surrounding acres for $3 million — a package that included Jacumba Mountain, a lake, a gas station, and all but two buildings on the town's main street, the paper reports. They then poured more than $10 million into renovations and redesign, closing the property for about two years while the work was underway.
From 1950s Motor Lodge to Boutique Retreat
The hotel itself dates back to a 1950s motor lodge, built during an earlier era when Jacumba drew visitors to its geothermal waters. Those waters still emerge naturally from underground artesian wells at temperatures around 101 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, feeding alkaline, mineral-rich pools without chemical chlorination, according to the Jacumba Hot Springs Resort Guide. The hotel advertises its pools as 100% natural and non-chlorinated, and the property now includes a ritual pool, a solstice pool, and an indoor soaking pool called the Echo Room, where guests are expected to keep completely silent, per the Union-Tribune.
The reborn resort houses 20 guest rooms, two suites and three off-site casitas, with standard rooms running around $180 a night and suites priced at $400, the paper reports. Day passes are also available for those who just want pool access. A restaurant called Long Shadow serves dishes including the Jacumba ribeye, a Highway 80 breakfast, and vegetarian and vegan options like a za'atar bowl, and it hosts live music on Sunday nights. A spa called Shangri-La Grove offers massages and treatments, and the hotel rents out one main street space to local operators running an apothecary and hat shop.
A Town Built for Boom and Bust
Jacumba's fortunes have swung wildly for a century. Passenger train service on the San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway reached the town in 1919, turning the remote thermal spring into a premier getaway for Hollywood celebrities through the 1920s and 1930s, according to Wikipedia. That boom collapsed once Interstate 8 bypassed the town in the late 1960s, routing traffic away from Old Highway 80; by the 1980s, most of Jacumba's buildings had closed, per the Union-Tribune. It wasn't the town's first brush with total reinvention, either — in 1951, as destinations like Palm Springs rose to national prominence, the entire town, including the original Hotel Jacumba, its water company and its commercial buildings, was put up for sale as a single package for $400,000, according to the Times of San Diego. Jacumba's population, once around 1,150 at its 1930s peak per that outlet, had fallen to 540 residents in the 2020 census, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — though the Union-Tribune cites a more recent population figure of around 700 people.
Restoring the town has meant more than renovating a hotel. The owners also brought Jacumba Lake back from what had become a dumping ground overrun with invasive plants, and now offer kayaks and canoes there for anyone to use, the paper reports. Strukel told the Union-Tribune that the trio approached the project carefully and thoughtfully, and that, in her view, everything holds energy. Osborne described the undertaking as feeling like the opportunity of a lifetime, according to the same report.
A Border Just Down the Road
The hotel sits less than half a mile from the U.S.-Mexico border, a proximity that has shaped its recent history in ways its owners didn't choose. In May 2023, roughly 550 people crossed the border into Jacumba Hot Springs seeking asylum and awaited Border Patrol processing, according to the Union-Tribune; Osborne, Strukel and Winters provided food and water to people during that period. The border's presence has continued to surface in the area since — Hoodline has reported on smuggling activity nearby, and on a separate law enforcement raid on Old Highway 80 that led to an arrest on assault and booby-trap charges.
The Solar Project Next Door
The town's revival has also collided with California's clean energy mandates. Just outside Jacumba sits the Jacumba Valley Ranch Energy Park, a 600-acre solar and battery storage project built by developer BayWa r.e. at a reported cost of $416 million, according to the Union-Tribune. The facility includes 291,000 photovoltaic solar modules generating 90 megawatts of electricity alongside a 90-megawatt battery system, enough to power roughly 60,000 homes, per the Los Angeles Times. As part of its county approval, BayWa r.e. agreed to donate $4 million to a community benefit fund.
Osborne, Strukel and Winters filed a lawsuit seeking to block the project but lost. In January 2024, the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth District affirmed a lower court ruling against Osborne and the community group Save Jacumba, finding that San Diego County's environmental review and land-use approvals for the solar park complied fully with state law, according to the CASEMINE. The fight reflects a broader tension playing out across California's rural deserts: the state's Senate Bill 100, enacted in 2018, mandates that all retail electricity sales come from renewable and zero-carbon sources by 2045, a target that has pushed utility-scale solar and battery projects into remote communities like Jacumba, per the California Energy Commission.
Despite the setback, the hotel has leaned into the desert setting rather than away from it. On weekends, the property hosts candlelight concerts and live performances inside the open-air, roofless brick ruins of Jacumba's historic 1920s bathhouse, which burned down in 1983, according to the Los Angeles Times. The renovated hotel has also added accessibility features, including ADA-compliant pool lifts, wheelchair-accessible rooms, and designated van parking, according to the Ultimate Hot Springs Guide. Whether the investment ultimately reverses decades of decline in a town of roughly 700 people remains to be seen, but for now, Jacumba's owners are wagering that mineral water, quiet, and a rebuilt Main Street can pull the border outpost back from the brink.
