My first trip to Acapulco was as a travel writer on assignment in 2010, when several new hotels opened and Mexico’s fabled mid-century jet-set resort seemed poised for a revival. On my last night, I took a taxi from Old Acapulco (the fishing village that first attracted Errol Flynn, Ava Gardner and John Wayne) to dinner on the other side of the city. But as we passed the towers of the ‘70s-era Golden Zone that wraps the shoreline of Santa Lucia Bay, the resort’s jaw-dropping picture-postcard centerpiece, I had a fight with the cab driver—I can’t recall why—and ended up abandoned on a corner, waiting for a pal to rescue me. The next day, as I flew home, there was a drug-gang shootout at that very same intersection. When the smoke cleared, six innocent people were dead, including a mother and child.

My travel magazine editors had a meltdown but I saved the story by pointing out there’d been a shootout in Times Square that week, a block away from their office—and no one was leaving New York. So, I managed to publish praise of the city’s natural attractions and multi-cultural man-made delights. For Acapulco has been a destination since Hernán Cortès made it the first great port of the eastern Pacific, where galleons riding the trade winds brought silk, spice, and ivory from Manila and China to the western hemisphere. But new hotels notwithstanding, Acapulco’s troubles were hardly over.

Drug-related violence persisted, making me glad I stayed in a villa behind the guarded gates of the luxe Las Brisas neighborhood on a 2016 visit. Seven years later, last September, that villa was nearly destroyed when the category 5 hurricane Otis hit Acapulco with a sudden, catastrophic fury that killed dozens and injured thousands, destroyed more than 50,000 houses, knocked out power and communications, and damaged its airport, hospitals and clinics, and many of the high-rise towers and hotels that lined the bay.

The good news is that Acapulco is coming back—again. Mere days after Otis, businessmen led by Carlos Slim Helú, Mexico’s richest man, met with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and committed not just to rebuilding Acapulco, but reinforcing its security, ensuring its water supply, improving its transportation infrastructure, and redesigning its urban spaces. Millions in investment were promised to kick-start projects to upgrade the central La Condesa district and make it more family-friendly, create a new nightclub zone near Las Brisas, remodel the historic San Diego Fort and bring a branch of Mexico City’s Inbursa Aquarium to Acapulco. López Obrador also promised that the 10,000 military and national guard soldiers who’d flooded the city post-Otis would remain indefinitely, stationed at 38 new facilities throughout surrounding Guerrero state, “to guarantee peace and tranquility.”

Less than nine months later, Slim’s Acapulco hotel, formerly the Calinda, began re-opening with a new name, Amares, new hurricane-resistant windows and two new restaurants. The 255 rooms at Las Brisas are open, too, along with 221 of the 281 hotels that operated before the storm, including Encanto, Banyan Tree Cabo Marqués, and John Wayne’s historic Los Flamingos. And the national commitment to revive the resort has been re-affirmed by Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president-elect, who takes office in October. “Acapulco is on its feet,” she declared at a rally this spring. “We have to continue to support Acapulco…so that it is even better than before.”