New kid on the beach
The Riviera Nayarit is sure to live up to the same solid reputation of its older siblings.
By Bob Schulman
By Bob Schulman
One of the big decisions at the Hotel des Artistes is whether to tan on the beach or in the hotel's infinity pool. Photo courtesy of Hotel des Artistes, image by Raul Alvarez Rojas.
Mexico's extended family of super-resorts—places like Cancun, the Riviera Maya, Puerto Vallarta and Los Cabos— have welcomed a new sibling to the fold. Christened the Riviera Nayarit, it's sprouting up along a hundred miles of golden sands on the country's Pacific shoreline.
Check out a map, and you'll spot the State of Nayarit just north of Puerto Vallarta. Along the coast you'll see little dots marking the towns of Litibu, Punta Raza and El Capomo. You probably never heard of them, but they're set to become great big dots over the next few years. And there's another speck way up the coast that's destined to become an outright splash on the map (despite it's unlikely name, translated to “the goats”). More about that later.
Until now, Nayarit was perhaps best known as a place where artists, surfers, aging hippies and retirees could tuck into small villages offering a cheap, bohemian lifestyle—a sort of paradise for pesos. In the sleepy seaside towns of Sayulita and San Pancho, for instance, a few thousand locals rub elbows with a few hundred foreign transplants, mostly Baby Boomers from the States.
In Sayulita, Jan and Dean surfing ballads of the '60s waft through his restaurant as Rollie Dick explains why he left his job as a school principal in California to resettle here. “I came (to Sayulita) on vacation in 1998,” he recalls, “and right away I fell in love with the place. Not just a puppy kind of love...it was head-over-heels.” Soon after that, he moved here with his family and opened the restaurant with the idea of selling “home cookin' in paradise.” Comfort food, it seems, is at ease in any culture.
Dick bought the building for $90,000 and spruced it up to the tune of another $50,000. It's now valued at as much as $1.7 million and prices in these parts are ratcheting up every day. “This place is like a Wild West boom town,” Dick says, “but it hasn't lost one iota of its magic.”
There goes the neighborhood
What's sparking all the action is Sayulita's new neighbor Litibu. Being built from scratch a few miles down the road, Litibu—the first of the Riviera's new mega-Edens—is taking shape along a mile-long beachfront. Driving by, visitors can see the rising steel skeletons of soon-to-open big name hotels along with scalloped hillsides shortly to be brimming with condos and homes, some edging up against a championship golf course.
Like Dick, the townsfolk in Sayulita are betting their community will be able to hold on to its laid-back charm through all this. They point to a similar situation in another state where the booming resort of Ixtapa was created a couple of miles away from the old fishing village of Zihuatanejo. Early in the pairing, the locals likely had nightmares of losing their mom-and-pop shops to Walmarts, block-long hardware stores and immense shopping malls. They feared having to put up with mobs of tourists traipsing through their gardens and asking to use their bathrooms.
Well, Zihuatanejo did grow quite a bit, but the nightmare scenarios never panned out—thanks to good planning and sensitivity to the issues shown by community leaders and the developers.
Bottom line, Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, as the area became known, showed old Mexico could peacefully (and profitably) coexist with new Mexico.
Another mega-development on the Riviera is planned up the coast at Punta Raza. On the drawing board are gated clusters of close to a thousand homes, eight hotels, a championship golf course and a marina. As in Sayulita, the project is hiking up land values in the nearby artsy village of Rincon de Guayabitos. Much the same scene is unfolding a little further north at El Capomo. There, a half-dozen hotels (for starters) will share a whopping 338 acres of prime beachfront lots with over 2,000 residential units and (you guessed it) a championship golf course.
Sprinkled along the Riviera will be lots of other developments including a number targeted to buyers with flatter pocketbooks. “We'll be offering something for everyone, with a particular eye on Baby Boomers,” says Riviera spokesman Richard Zarkin.
One down, five new go up
So how are local officials keeping all this from destroying the natural beauty of Nayarit? For one thing, the landscape won't be blotted out by high-rise hotels and condos. That's because recently enacted state laws cap all new buildings at just four stories. Also, laws encourage developers to build projects accenting the beauty of the existing landscape; for instance, if trees or plants are removed by developers, they have to replace each one with five new ones somewhere in the same area.
Ticking off a long list of other eco-safeguards, Zarkin stresses that sustainable tourism and environmental concerns “are taken very seriously here.”
The colonial port of San Blas, a little over a hundred miles up the coast from Puerto Vallarta, until a few months ago anchored the Riviera's northern tip. Another favorite of artists and American expats, San Blas also draws a sizable number of mainstream tourists, including hordes of birdwatchers, who stay at hotels such as the Garza Canela. A big draw to the hotel is its famous gourmet restaurant, El Delfin, where Cordon Bleu-trained chef Betty Vazquez serves up legendary dishes. Among her triumphs: octopus with oranges and red onions, and baked chicken breast with goat cheese and hierba santa. And unforgettable homemade Yaca ice cream.
Recently, state officials opted to extend the northern end of the Riviera another 67 miles to the Nayaritan border with the State of Sinaloa. Besides adding ancient Aztec historic sites to the Riviera, the extension also positioned it as a neighbor to yet another new super-resort. This one is being built on an immense site a few miles up the Sinaloan coast at Las Cabras (“the goats”).
Planned to be the grand-daddy of all Mexican resorts, the Las Cabras project will be twice the size of Mexico's current tourism giant at Cancun. It'll open in phases through 2025, at which time Las Cabras—by then served by its own international airport—will have miles and miles of tropical palaces lining its golden beaches (and will very likely lop over into Nayarit). Planners say the project will give a whole new meaning to the term “world-class resort.”
Flashbulb point
The southern section of the Riviera is gaining on worldliness too. It's now home to a spectacular St. Regis property, debuted last year in the posh Punta Mita area just below Sayulita and Litibu. Some of its neighbors are the Four Seasons, the Hotel Artistes Beach Club & Spa, the Palladium Resort & Spa and its upscale sister resort the Royal Suites. Around here, the glitterati rule. Look close and you might catch a glimpse of the likes of George Clooney, Will Smith, Gwyneth Paltrow, John Travolta and Jennifer Aniston. Their posses surround them protectively, given the unfettered photo techniques of the paparazzi.
. A royal treat—Abandon the rigors of ruling the roost back home in favor of taking it easy under the thatched palapas of The Palladium Royal Suites. Photo by Bob Schulman.
Next down the coast toward Puerto Vallarta are a number of high-rise condo developments and the recently opened Riviera Nayarit Marina, one of the biggest yacht anchorages in Mexico. All this is sparking new life into close-by cities such as La Cruz de Huanacaxtle and Bucerias.
Anchoring the southern end of the Riviera are the popular resort areas of Nuevo Vallarta and Flamingos, both just a short drive from the Puerto Vallarta airport. The latest newcomer there is Villa Group Resorts' 135-suite Villa La Estancia where guests are pampered with luxuries such as a 17,000-square-foot Tatewari spa, gourmet dining and, catch this, in-room Jacuzzis. Visitors to La Estancia are in for a special treat when they come back to their rooms after a night on the town. Under softened lights, they'll find their Jacuzzi filled with exotically scented water (somehow at just the right temperature) and floating rose petals.
Details: Visit www.rivieranayarit.com plus
Mexico Tourism Board at www.visitmexico.com
www.hoteldesartistesdelmar.com
St. Regis at www.starwoodhotels.com/stregis
Palladium properties at www.fiestahotelgroup.com
Nayarit
