Mazatlan offers beaches and history

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BY GEORGE LANG

Published: December 21, 2008

Mazatlan, on Mexico’s Pacific coast, boasts miles of beautifully maintained beaches. Photo by Laura Lang

Sometimes all you need is a beach, a swim-up bar and a sun that never goes behind the clouds, but tastes are changing. Mazatlan, the scenic port city on Mexico’s Pacific coast, has the pristine beaches vacationers crave and the real culture they will remember long after their tans fade.

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Mazatlan boasts a population of 445,000 — that includes about 7,000 expatriates who got seduced by the area’s tropical beauty, low cost of living and the plentiful shrimp that supply Mazatlan with its culinary calling card and chief industry.

While condominiums continue to spring up on the north beach areas, short-term visitors will likely gravitate to the hotels and resorts in the Golden Zone, the miles of beachfront properties dominated by the El Cid Resorts, including the 25-story El Cid El Moro Beach.

El Moro Beach offers gorgeous ocean views and reasonable room rates: the hotel is offering winter specials from $82 a night and one-bedroom oceanview suites for $146 per night. The Golden Zone is packed with the beautiful hotels that sprang up in the 1970s and ’80s, but colorful options exist on either side of the district.

These include the five-star Riu Emerald Bay to the north, opening in May 2009 near picturesque Witch Beach (named for the perilous surf), and the old-school hotels to the south along Playa Olas Atlas in Old Mazatlan, where stars such as John Wayne and Gary Cooper stayed while sport fishing along the coast in the ’40s and ’50s.

Old Mazatlan is an area best seen from a pulmonia, an open-air taxi built on a Volkswagen Beetle chassis. The pulmonias earned their name because operators of enclosed taxis tried to warn visitors away from their competitors, saying they would get pneumonia riding in them. These rides offer unobstructed views of Mazatlan Bay, with its gorgeous Goat, Deer and Bird Islands, and the malecon, the longest seawall on Mexico’s Pacific coast.

While Old Mazatlan is the birthplace of major Mexican bar and restaurant chains such as Senor Frog’s and El Shrimp Bucket, this area is also the site of El Faro, which Mazatlecos claim is the highest-elevation lighthouse in the world and was built in 1879. But it is the downtown area known as Machado Square that represents the flavor of Old Mazatlan and the spirit of the city’s new development.

Most of the colonial buildings in Machado Square, Named for Juan Nepomuceno Machado, the Filipino immigrant who established much of Mazatlan’s commercial development in the mid-1800s, remained boarded up 10 years ago. But the efforts of local businessmen turned the square into a thriving cultural area filled with galleries, conservatories, excellent restaurants such as Pedro Y Lola, and Teatro Angela Peralta, the opera house named for the renowned soprano who gave her last concert in Mazatlan before dying in 1883.

This is Mazatlan’s trump card against other, more commercialized Mexican destinations: It is a city that values its history and unique spirit as much as it does its beachfront and nightlife.

Related Topics: Culture and Lifestyle, Travel and Tourism, Hotels