Pacific Coast Region Guide

Mexico’s Pacific coast runs for well over two thousand kilometres, and it holds both the country’s oldest resorts and some of its least developed shoreline.

Puerto Vallarta is the established favourite — a cobbled old town around a church with a crown-shaped tower, a long seafront promenade of sculpture, and the Sierra Madre coming down to the water in a bay that Humpback whales winter in.

South of it the coast empties. The Oaxaca coast around Mazunte, Zipolite and Puerto Escondido is a string of surf beaches and small towns that grew from fishing villages and are still recognisably that; Puerto Escondido’s Zicatela break is one of the heaviest beach breaks in the world.

Inland, a short way up, the coast rises into the Sierra Madre and a completely different country: cloud forest, coffee, and the mountain towns of Michoacan and Oaxaca.

Puerto Vallarta and Banderas Bay

The old town, the Malecon promenade with its bronze sculptures, and the cobbled streets of the Zona Romantica. Boats across the bay to Yelapa and Las Animas, villages with no road access, and the Marietas islands offshore. Whales from December to March.

The Oaxaca coast

Puerto Escondido for surf and a proper town rather than a resort; Mazunte and Zipolite for slow beaches and the turtle centre; and the mangrove lagoons at La Ventanilla and Manialtepec, the latter bioluminescent on dark nights in the wet season.

Guerrero and Michoacan

Zihuatanejo, a fishing town with a working harbour, and the empty beaches of the Michoacan coast, which sees almost no visitors.

Inland and up

An hour or two from the coast the road climbs into the Sierra Madre del Sur and the Sierra Madre Occidental: coffee fincas, cloud forest, and the mountain towns. Michoacan’s monarch butterfly reserves are further inland and receive the entire eastern North American population each winter.

The Nayarit coast

Sayulita and San Pancho, surf towns that have grown quickly, and the quieter beaches north of them.

The Pacific coast is several regions that happen to share a shoreline, and its character changes completely along its length.

Sea and sierra

The mountains come almost to the water for most of this coast, so the settlements are a string of pockets rather than a continuous society. Historically people moved along the coast by boat rather than overland, and the coastal towns have more in common with each other than with the highland cities an hour inland.

Indigenous coast and mountains

The Huichol — Wixarika — of the Nayarit and Jalisco sierra are known for yarn paintings and beadwork encoding peyote-vision imagery, and make an annual pilgrimage to Wirikuta in the desert hundreds of kilometres away. Inland from the Oaxaca coast the Mixtec and Chatino, and in Michoacan the Purepecha, who were never conquered by the Aztecs.

Afro-Mexican Costa Chica

The Guerrero and Oaxaca coast between Acapulco and Huatulco has a substantial Afro-Mexican population, descended from enslaved Africans brought to the Pacific ports, with their own music, dance and a long fight for constitutional recognition, finally achieved in 2019.

Resort history

Acapulco was the first Mexican beach resort and the glamour destination of the 1950s and 1960s; its later decline and the 2023 hurricane are a large part of the coast’s recent story.

Sea turtles nest along this whole coast, and several beaches — Mazunte, Escobilla, Playa Ventura — are among the most important nesting sites on earth. Never touch a nesting female or a nest, never use flash or white light on the beach at night, and release hatchlings only through an organised sanctuary programme. Mazunte’s turtle centre exists because the village gave up a slaughterhouse in 1990 and turned to conservation.

Whale watching in Banderas Bay is regulated: licensed operators, minimum distances, no swimming with them. Choose a permitted boat.

Development pressure is intense on the Vallarta-Nayarit corridor and increasingly on the Oaxaca coast, with mangrove clearance and water stress. Smaller locally owned places are the better choice, and increasingly the more interesting one.

Water is scarce along much of the coast in the dry season.

Indigenous communities inland — Huichol, Nahua, Purepecha, Mixtec — have their own arrangements; buy crafts directly and ask before photographing.

November to April is the dry season and the best window: warm, around 28 to 31°C, low humidity, reliable sun and calm mornings. December to March is the peak.

December to March is also humpback whale season in Banderas Bay, where they come from Alaska to calve, and the sightings are reliable.

May to October is hot, humid and wet, with heavy afternoon rain and the hurricane risk running June to November. The Pacific hurricane season is active and this coast is exposed — Acapulco was devastated by Otis in 2023, which intensified faster than almost any storm on record.

Surf at Puerto Escondido is biggest from May to September, when the southern-hemisphere swell arrives; this is when the serious competitions run and when the break is genuinely dangerous.

Turtle arrivals — arribadas — at Escobilla peak between July and December.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the region

The range is wide. A beach cabana at Zipolite and a villa at Punta Mita are on the same coast and differ by a factor of fifty.