Boulder Base
San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico
Specs: Last summer, Boulder Base opened in San Miguel de Allende, a city located in south-central Mexico’s state of Guanajuato. According to the gym’s website, the operators’ goal is “to create a welcoming environment that fosters both physical and mental development, while also serving as a meeting point for like-minded individuals to build friendships and share experiences.” The mixed-discipline gym is owned by Jessie Harper, Katie Tymchyshen, Sergio Echeverria and Josué Marrero, and was founded by Harper. Harper wanted her daughter to have a place to train and to add an activity in the town for kids, which sparked the idea for a gym. “San Miguel’s beautiful, but it doesn’t have a lot of infrastructure for kids’ activities,” Harper stated. “So that was my personal motivation for doing this, to give the families something to do.”
Harper had taken her daughter to climb at the nearest gym in a neighboring town, and climbing clicked quickly. “She looked at me and said, ‘I want to do this in the Olympics,’” Harper said of her daughter. Harper mentioned the experience to her daughter’s robotics coach, and the topic of climbing made its way through the grapevine until Harper met Marrero, who introduced her to Echeverria. One day, the three of them went climbing with Harper’s daughters, and the gym conversation started immediately. “It wasn’t like, ‘Do you want to do this?’ It was like, ‘Okay, how do we start?’” Harper recalled. The team then started looking for bodegas that could house the gym and began making business plans. In September 2023, the ownership team rented a space, hired Muta for the climbing walls, and then spent the following months designing the gym and talking about details. By March 2024, the walls were built, and that summer the doors opened to the public.
Located in a residential area, Boulder Base is situated in a house rented from a family. The Boulder Base team looked at several different bodegas in San Miguel, with various parameters: The building needed to be close enough to the city center that it could be easily accessed, but far enough away that parking would not be an issue. Additionally, Harper explained there are several building height restrictions in the city center, and they needed a building with at least two stories for their vision. She noted the chosen space was the tallest building the team could find without being in a manufacturing area, which ended up being a happy medium between height and location. “We built it here in this space with the intention of someday growing and moving,” Harper said. “I would love to have a bigger piece of property to build it from the ground up and make it a taller wall, a more adequate gym, a bigger boulder. There’s a bigger dream there.”
Boulder Base features 148 square meters (1,593 square feet) of climbing wall surface area in the 156-square-meter (1,679-square-foot) space. The gym’s bouldering walls reach 4.5 meters (14.8 feet), and the roped walls reach 6 meters (19.7 feet). In the training area, there are weights, stability balls, finger strengthening tools, and hangboards. The gym offers group climbing experiences, opportunities to climb outside, and instructional and training classes for kids and adults. Harper sees 50 kids weekly who take an afterschool program she leads. “We’ve really worked on developing a young community because our goal is to be here for the long run,” Harper shared. “Creating these teams, community, especially for younger kids, for us is everything.”
Walls: Muta
Flooring: Muta
CRM Software: Beta
Website: www.boulderbasemx.com
Instagram: @San_Miguel_Climbing
In Their Words: “We did it right from the beginning. We made a very professional wall. We hired Muta…they’re wonderful, they have been super professional. The wall is the best quality that we could find…Between it being super high quality, super supported by the community, and us just being here, it’s really made it a special place. We’ve had some climbers that started with us in the very beginning, and they are like our family now.” – Jessie Harper, Boulder Base Co-Owner and Founder
