Mexico's sensational Sayulita and pacific coast
With a blaze and a glitter, the day begins. The town of Sayulita on Mexico’s Pacific north coast smells so headily of salt that the ash-pale feathers of the pelicans patrolling its dawn waves seem burnished by the stuff. A handful of kids have been in the blue water with their boards since first light, moving in that heedless way of surfers since childhood, super-aware of the brackets and hinges of their bodies. Some even stroll up and down the length of their boards-in-motion, as though loitering on a warm corner; then take a wave, and leap up, light as a bundle of sticks.
Fifteen years ago Sayulita was quiet, near forgotten, a low-built village with a population of a few hundred. There were just a couple of hotels back then, and nothing to speak of in the hamlet of San Pancho next door, both sharing a wide curl of white sand and protected by the jungle, and Sierra Madre mountains, with all the remains and tombs and colonial towns beyond – the whole grand march of Mexican history. Although Sayulita is perhaps four times more populous now, with pretty shops and places to eat, nothing feels distorted or spoiled.
On this early morning, the air is full of the claggy, perfumed sweetness of corn dough. Outside Naty’s Cocina on calle Marlin a few people are drinking homemade lime agua fresca while waiting for simple 15-peso tacos with pollo mola that taste better than the world’s most ingenious sandwiches. Under chattering parakeets, fallen almond blossom floats in a puddle on a recently washed pavement. A man pulls a cart heavy with stubby cucumbers towards the sea, nodding hello to three teenage girls in high-waisted denim shorts, their bosoms wobbling, hair centre-parted and worn in long, onyx plaits, like sexed-up Frida Kahlos.
As the day widens and the light goes gold, newly arrived Swedish girls labour along the seafront with their heavy rucksacks, white fringes blowing, past slobbering, happy dogs playing with Frisbees and a great mass of bickering hens, their chicks tumbling across the sand like wastepaper. Life here seems easy, ridiculous: a jackfruit kingdom of hot days. Along the surf just beyond (and the surf is always just beyond, there are only a few streets in the whole town) are ebony-sheeny, confident birds called grackles, swanking and twisting across the clear green shallows, their cries like wet fingers prodding you to be more sociable.
I sit for a while with 21-year-old Diego Mignot, a Frenchman who lives just moments from the waves with his mother and sister in an unusual guesthouse that winds ever upwards like a castle turret, and has no glass in any of its windows; whole rooms open year-round to the sea and air. One of the star surfers here, Diego has a face that’s lean and smooth and brown as clay, with a wide, singing kind of mouth and shaggy, yarrow-tipped hair.
‘What were you thinking about out there on your board?’ I ask and he offers his whitest grin. ‘Just waiting for the line to appear on the horizon,’ he shrugs. ‘Just sitting and waiting for the swell.’
The Mignot family seem to me typical of the sort of people who wind up here. People with a story, characters as though imagined by Paul Theroux; bohemians moving through life with improvisational ingenuity. For a time, the family sold black pearls along the beaches of Sardinia. Some lived in a ketch off the coast of Panama.
And although surfing is now a very professional thing and about to be an Olympic sport, with talk of diets and weights and fitness, the way the kids surf in Sayulita is far wilder and sweeter. I’ve seen footage of Diego surfing in a pro-competition in Hawaii. Among a gaggle of gleaming muscle and sponsors, there he is, not doggedly trying to win but instead hurling himself off his board at a vital moment, slim as an arrow, into a roaring blue wall of water. It makes me laugh out loud, like watching Cary Grant acing a backflip in Holiday at the sheer joy of being so alive and agile.
Have i told you about the nights in San Pancho when I first got here?’ asks Ricardo Hernandez, who moved to this part of the coast from Mexico City in the 1980s and for a decade had to ring his mother every month to send him toothpaste and shampoo because it was still hard to come by.
And yet the way Hernandez describes San Pancho in those days doesn’t sound – save for a few boutiques and bars – so very different to the nights I spend here, watching kids sitting around fires on the beach, a couple of them rubbing oil into their grandmother’s swollen legs as she smiles in bliss. There’s an air of faded wealth along the sand-trodden cobbles: for a time in the 1970s the village of San Pancho was the holiday destination of the president, Luis Echeverría. Tonight, cafés are lit with candles, dancing and peaceful. Most of the doors to the turquoise and lime-painted houses are open and in one dimly lit front room, its windows fluttering with clean-raggedy lace curtains, an elderly couple sits under an immense framed photograph of a Zapata-era bride.
In a sawn-off VW Beetle, a family of sun-blasted blondes eat sweet Mexican bread, mouths white with powdered sugar. Shops are selling ice-pops and chilli sauce, and trinket bracelets the colours of gypsy caravans. In windows, woven hangings by the indigenous Wixaritari people depict corn cobs pulsing under a triumphant sun and hummingbirds circling deer, so brimming and lavish you have to blink several times to focus on them. Children sit cross-legged on a ledge by a pavement shrine, where a painting of Jesus hangs next to an exultant cupid. Later, when I return to this place with a map drawn on a napkin, clearly lost, one of them takes me by the arm and guides me, singing to himself, accompanied by his ankle-licking pit bull.
When the film director John Huston first travelled along this part of Mexico’s Pacific coast in a dugout canoe in the 1920s, he noted that, ‘Life here is lived in the open. At night, wild creatures come down to inspect: coatimundis, boars, ocelots, jaguars.’ Returning in 1962 to make The Night of the Iguana with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner, he stayed in the coastal town of Puerto Vallarta, 20 miles south of Sayulita. Then the smallest of fishing villages, it had one hotel catering to mulateers. Burton took a house, an elegant stone hacienda, Casa Kimberly, and hid out with his newly acquired Cleopatra. The paparazzi went wild: both he and Elizabeth Taylor were still married to other people.
Over the years the couple renovated the house, adding floors and a pool and even a little bridge crossing the lane. The movie was a hit, their relationship a perpetual scandal, and soon the tourists started coming. I have a picture of Burton-Taylor on the roof of the house, brown as cigars, him with a film script, her sensational breasts bursting out of a white bikini. In the near distance, the campanula-blue sweep of the bay and acres of jungle-tangled hills. How triumphant Burton looks. He’d escaped forever the February London drabness. The corned beef and the buses, the stiffness and oldness. He had reached the glittering south.
Casa Kimberly, pleated secretively into a cobbled street high in Puerto Vallarta old town, is now a small hotel where wide, cool, silky rooms are furnished with antique wardrobes and desks that smell richly of polish. One evening, sitting in the marble central courtyard, I watch as a mariachi band plays to guests drinking strong cucumber-and-mint Margaritas, applauding madly at the longer trumpet notes, just as the 9pm bells start ringing from the parish church of Our Lady of Guadalupe on calle Hidalgo.
I’d been inside the church earlier, full of the sweet reek of myrrh and molten wax. The altar was a riot of orange velvet swags, and all through the service the doors were left open, so those on the steps outside could hear the bidding prayers. Inside, at a glass case in a corner, where I knelt to light a candle, a life-size effigy of the Virgin wore tremendous false eyelashes, like Liza Minnelli. O Dios, enséñenos servir en vez de ser servidos. Oh Lord, teach us to serve rather than be served.
The next day I catch a ride a few miles south, towards a string of fishing villages, including the down-at-heel Boca de Tomatlan, and Mismaloya where The Night of the Iguana was actually filmed. Others are more remote, and can still only be reached by water; Huston rented land here for a while in the 1970s, living with just a shortwave radio and his Mexican girlfriend.
My friend Angela Allen was the script-girl on Iguana. Now 86, she tells me she used to take a boat to collect Liz Taylor from Casa Kimberly at lunchtime and bring her to the set, Taylor well-bedded and happy, lightly complaining that she hadn’t brought her best jewels to dazzle Richard. ‘Oh Angela,’ she would sigh as she pinned an aquamarine the size of her thumb to a summer dress, ‘this is what I call my sweater collection.’
I’m lured by the promise of spectacular coves even further south, with deserted swathes of deep-gaudy shell glades and sand dotted with tufts of pale sea-thrift. And so one day I drive for hours along the single road from Puerto Vallarta down towards the Costalegre, past Cabo Corrientes which juts imperiously into the Pacific like the nose on a Georgian cameo.
After a while the main road starts to tend away from the coast, as though keeping the sea secret, passing great plantations of papaya and mango. Labourers, eyes half-closed in the heat, eat huevos con jamon in cafés under pictures of the Sacred Heart that are decorated with tinsel, and donkeys stumble along the pitted tarmac, past dusty walls laid out with perfect green bananas waiting for the ripening afternoon sun.
Eventually I turn off and struggle up a dented track towards Las Alamandas, a hotel owned by Isabel Goldsmith-Patiño. The 1,500-acre coastal plot was bought decades ago by her grandfather, a Bolivian tin baron, who intended to develop it but never got round to finishing it. After he died, he left it to Isabel, who in the late 1980s hacked through the brush down to the beach and built a few villas and a couple of restaurants, but left it at that, reluctant to impinge too much, painting everything pink and yellow in a mad flourish, like the dressing room of an actress.
‘I remember the first time I saw the sea, and the hours it had taken to get there from Mexico City, and how cool and elegant my grandfather was, and there was me, looking like old spinach,’ says Isabel over dinner one night. She mentions her grandfather, Antenor Patiño, and her father, the buccaneer James Goldsmith. She’s the oldest of his eight children, and the only child of his first wife Maria Patiño, a teenage heiress who died after giving birth, and of whom a stricken Jimmy rarely spoke again.
In her pomp, Isabel was a raging beauty, with a full sonorant face and hot eyes. Now in advancing middle-age she shares the same, slightly laconic expression as her half-siblings Jemima and Zac, and several other Goldsmiths who own bits of land around here. She mentions them now and again, as people do in Chekhov plays, as extended family who might burst in, feuding, at any moment after collecting mushrooms in the birch forest. Her hair, as she speaks, is wafting and salt-crusted in the thick night heat, and her slow, mercurial, foreign drawl – part Latin American, part Surrey convent – suggests she has experienced every emotion in her life, and sometimes possibly thrice-over in 24 hours.
I like the photos in the lobby of her sitting with Robert De Niro, on sofas in the presidential suite some time in the remote 1990s. The images are sun-bleached almost to mere outlines. I fancy I can smell that decade here. The Monte Cristo Nb2 and Piz Buin. On the shore beyond, hundreds of frigatebirds stand still in the darkness with their heads up towards stars and fireflies, as though consulting some cosmic departure board.
If the rising and falling melody of the Pacific dominates everything, it’s a fierceness that knows it will go on, world without end. But the next day, trying to escape it even for a short while by heading inland, a sense of unreality supervenes and I feel like I’ve chickened out and switched off my ears. Travelling away from the coast into small and crumbling colonial towns, I find shops selling second-hand hobby-horses and coconut hooch and there are racks of postcards of bucolic Mexican scenes, puma and armadillo lounging at waterfalls. And yet such towns can feel watchful. Timid dogs turn over twigs looking for food they missed the first time.
I see a man, covered entirely in inkings of a forest, casually eating corncake from a newspaper. The patterned fronds extend across his shaved scalp; just his eyes peer through the foliage. And even though I see many prettier things – butterflies the size of birds, and a setting sun over a volcano – my mind is always drawn back to the Pacific, its roar and dustless blue.‘Tonight I started to dream of Puerto Vallarta,’ wrote Richard Burton in his diary, when those Mexican days were a bewitchment of more than 20 years earlier, an internal sanctum, ‘…and sunbathing and walks through the cobbled town at dusk… and being salt-cleaned and clear-skinned and even slim. And maybe the iguanas have come back to live on the roof. You never know.’
When, later that month, I make it back to Sayulita, it’s a Saturday afternoon and a plump Mexican boy, dressed to the nines in Cuban heels and a sombrero with swinging tassels, parades through the streets on a grey mule. As if a touch of grace has passed over him, everyone looks up and nods their approval. Roars of laughter rise from a barbershop, and the sound of men shuffling cards. Traders selling strawberries out of great tin buckets yell jokes at each other in front of Bar Cama, where girls visiting from Ischia sway to The Pixies in backless Rapsodia dresses, drinking mescal newly arrived from Oaxaca that tastes like fireworks in my mouth.
As stall holders weave baskets out on the streets, the lights from houses in the hills and lamps on street tables pick out the curves of the beach and the surf pouring bean-green in the night. Much later, crossing the town square, feeling the narcotic pulse of the hot pavement and the melting sensation of safety, of drifting away, I see Diego and his mother Nathalie, in a red dress with a flood of dark hair to her waist, snaking handsomely through crowds still full of music and voices, under trees dripping with trumpet flowers.
Abercrombie & Kent offers a 13-night itinerary around Mexico’s Pacific coast from £5,395 per person based on two sharing, including international flights and private transfers. +44 1242 386475; abercrombiekent.co.uk
To read our full feature on Sayulita, Mexico, click here.
Where to stay on Mexico's north pacific coast
IMANTA RESORTS PUNTA DE MITA
With 250 acres for just 36 guests, this epic site combines green jungle, white beach and blue water carved into frothing curls, storks contemplatively dotting the shallows. There’s something almost Cornish about the sea-spray here, but at night the phosphorescence turns any evening swim into a dip in fire. Coatimundi sit on porches like shy cats. The outdoor spa is especially gorgeous, set among ancient trees, with imprints of what looks like fossilised ferns in the pale clay walkways. In one suite, a 3.5-million-year-old boulder has been hand-chiselled into the world’s most barmy and voluptuous bath. Chefs grow and grind their own corn for tacos and tortillas. In March, baby humpbacks dawdle just beyond the beach restaurant. Sayulita is only a short drive away, via winding roads signed for crocodiles and crabs and through a village where pigs rootle around polite school children, who wear long, burgundy socks and gather for traditional dancing with sticks. imantaresorts.com. Double rooms from about £750
Address: Imanta Resorts Punta de Mita, Monte Nahuac Lote L, 63734 Higuera Blanca, Nay., Mexico
Telephone: +52 329 298 42 00
Website: imantaresorts.com
Price: Double rooms from about £750
CASA LOVE, SAYULITA
A singular guesthouse just a stumble from the Sayulita surf; there’s something Rivendell-ish about the way this place seems to rise up and up, with no need for glass in its windows, just walls open to the sun, and mimosa-laden air, an unfurling framework of little bedrooms and warm-walled terraces. In the communal area I found a sandalled surf star in a hammock reading Hemingway and the proprietor, Nathalie Mignot, standing with a great machete lopping off the heads of a pile of fresh coconuts, the staircase up from the street a blazing and jubilant tunnel painted in rosa mexicana, and tangerine hearts.
Address: Casa Love, Delfines 10, 63734 Sayulita, Mexico
Telephone: +52 329 291 3173
Website: casalove.pachamamasayulita.com
Price: Double rooms from about £80
CASA KIMBERLY, PUERTO VALLARTA
Crashingly enticing and once the 1960s holiday home of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. A discreet backstreet gate gives onto high stone staircases and a tinkling chandelier illuminating walls studded with black-and-white photographs of the couple in their (calmer) private moments (note the one of her lovingly cutting his hair). The old mesquite-wood beds in the nine suites are especially carnal – they seem to have been made to be rolled around in with Ricardo Montalbán circa Fiesta, his hand ever-inching up your thighs. A little bridge divides the building – on the other side lies Burton’s private swimming pool where you can dawdle in the evenings to the sound of waiters replenishing crystal glasses in the restaurant beyond. ‘Do you remember Richard Burton?’ I asked a passing local. ‘Ah yes,’ he sighed. ‘He would walk barefoot along here every day. In shorts, and just a vest. A vest!’
Address: Casa Kimberly, Calle Zaragoza 445. Puerto Vallarta 48300, Mexico
Telephone: +52 322 222 1336
Website: casakimberly.com
Price: Double rooms from about £275
LAS ALAMANDAS, COSTALEGRE COAST
The mad, bare splendour of this hotel is perhaps best encapsulated in the story of a local, lovelorn princess who decreed that anybody visiting the beach could only leave after gathering a rare kind of seed-pod, found by rifling carefully through white sand. Not a single person would dream of ignoring her order. Such is the bewitching atmosphere, the flat and endless lushness, the wild horses by a river that ends just feet from the ocean, the blithe birds up trees, the early impatient tropical dark, and the Milky Way pulsing like the fingerstops-in-neon of a teach-yourself how-to-play the flute. Many of the views, especially in the electric hush of the late afternoon, are almost impossible to take in: they are simply not made on a human scale.
Address: Las Alamandas Resort, Carretera Federal, 200 km 82, Costalegre, Jalisco, Mexico
Telephone: +52 322 205 8054
Website: alamandas.com
Price: Double rooms from about £370
Oliver PilcherPelicans in formation, Sayulita, Mexico
Oliver PilcherBlossom, Sayulita, Mexico
Oliver PilcherCollecting shells, Sayulita, Mexico
Oliver PilcherCucumber margarita at Le Zouave, Sayulita, Mexico
Oliver PilcherDe Maco design shop at Punta da Mita, Sayulita, Mexico
Oliver PilcherThe family behind the Orangy juice bar, Sayulita, Mexico
Oliver PilcherSurf rack at Casa Love, Sayulita, Mexico
Oliver PilcherVideo games in a village shop, Sayulita, Mexico
Oliver PilcherDiego Mignot on the beach, Sayulita, Mexico
Oliver PilcherA local gaucho, Sayulita, Mexico
Oliver PilcherThe bathroom at Las Alamandas, Sayulita, Mexico
Oliver PilcherSurfer Diego Mignot at Casa Love, Sayulita, Mexico