However, the owners were unable to pay their debts to the state or to the builders. Manuel Suárez was the main creditor and acquired the property in 1934. That year the new president Lázaro Cárdenas took office. One of his first decrees banned gambling in Mexico since he saw casinos as centers of vice. Suárez retained the property but ran it purely as a hotel. Suárez and the Valencian architect Jesús Martí Martín founded the company Vías y Obras, which built facilities in the ports of Veracruz, Acapulco and other cities. Suárez built the Hotel Mocambo in Veracruz, and was involved in other industries, including sugar mills. In 1938 Malcolm Lowry moved to Cuernavaca to work on his novel "Under the Volcano", and described the hotel in the first chapter, In 1946 the Casino de la Selva was closed so that Vías y Obras could undertake various enlargements under the direction of Martí. The two blocks of rooms were each given a second floor, and a French-style garden was laid out in the area between them. New rooms were added to the main building. Other additions included a large convention hall, a bowling alley and cafeteria, a walkway around the Olympic pool, two more pools and sandy areas to give a beach-like atmosphere. The effect was much like the Hotel Mocambo. Félix Candela came to Mexico to escape Francoist Spain and worked for Vías y Obras from 1942 to 1947. He helped the architect Martí in his renovation of the Casino de la Selva. Candela is best known for his reinforced concrete shells, which he introduced to Mexico. These are based on hyperbolic paraboloids, in which straight beams can be used to build a saddle roof, and can cover large spans with minimal thickness. At the end of the 1950s the construction company of the brothers Félix, Antonio and Julia Candela built a dining room attached to an auditorium, and a non-denominational chapel in place of the fountain at the entrance, all with shell roofs. Candela's pupil, the architect Juan Antonio Tonda(), designed the shells and about 30 bungalows in the south of the site and oversaw construction. Later the chapel was converted to a nightclub, the Club Jano, and then the Discoteca Mambo. The dining room, the "Salón de los Relojes" (Room of the Clocks), had a roof formed of five paraboloid sections with a large clock hanging from the central point where the arcs intersected.