The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians plans to build a new development around the original hot springs that gives Palm Springs, California, its name.
The land there for many years was the site of the Spa Resort Hotel, but with it demolished there is now room for the resort to focus on the Agua Caliente Hot Mineral Spring, which is a spot long venerated by the tribe.
Last week Tribal Chairman Jeff Grubbe told the Desert Sun: “The primary focus for this council and membership is obviously the mineral springs and that corner. I can tell you that we’re not going to build anything on top of that. We want to leave that corner in its natural state. It would be nice to have what it used to look like before all this was built up.”
Grubbe said the tribe, which has about 480 members, would like to create an outdoor space that would show what the spring looked like in the early 1800s before the area was overrun with white settlers. “That spring is really the heart of our reservation,” he said.
Recently the tribe had a private dedication ceremony, complete with songs and rattles made from gourds to celebrate the replacement of an underground collection tank with a concrete collection tank.
Besides restoring the spring to something like its original condition, the tribe is also exploring building restaurants and retail shops near the existing casino. But the spring comes first. “That’s the most important piece of our reservation. And it means a lot of different things to a lot of different members,” Grubbe told the Sun.
The spring was originally used for bathing and medicinal purposes by the tribe as well as a focal point for religious observances. It was leased to settlers in the 1880s. They built bathhouses over the spring. In the 1950s development of the city created debris that clogged the spring. Eventually the Palm Springs Spa was developed and the city government created a collection tank for the water, which would then be reheated to serve the Spa Resort hotel, which was built adjacent to it. The spring is about ten feet under ground and water flows from it at a temperature of 105 degrees. Its source is about a mile underground.
The Spa Resort hotel was demolished in 2014. According to Grubbe, “The tribe took a lot of heat for that. But with all due respect, that structure did not define this tribe. We were here before that and so, this is an opportunity where we can show people that come visit or people that live here what, how much that corner means to us and what it was before Palm Springs was built up.”
But aside from that, the tribe hasn’t decided whether it will build another hotel, and what its configuration will be, and whether it will connect to the casino. The tribe is developing a full-blown master plan, the details of which should be nailed down later this year.
“We want to do it right,” Grubbe told the Sun. “We’ll have a plan in place so we can sit down with the city of Palm Springs and let them know what direction we’re going, because I think it’s important that we have that government-to-government relationship, we work together on this.”
The reservation is more than 31,000 acres that encompasses several cities, including Palm Springs, Cathedral City and Rancho Mirage.
