La Manzanilla

La Manzanilla is a small village on the Pacific Coast north of Manzanillo in the state of Jalisco. We visited La Manzanilla while we were staying in Barra de Navidad and decided that we would return and stay for a month. There are no banks in the village and the only grocery stores are small tiendas. We drove 14 km (9 mi) south to Melaque, the largest community on the coast between Puerto Vallarta and Manzanillo, to do most of our shopping. 

Entrance to La Manzanilla

La Manzanilla’s main attractions are the beach, water sports (fishing, swimming, surfing, kayaking), RV camping, La Catalina Natural Language School (link) and crocodile reserve (hence the statue on the way into town). The place is not well known among gringos, but is a popular weekend and holiday destination with Mexicans.

La Manzanilla is on the east side of Bahía Tenacatita, which is 8 km (5 mi) across at the mouth, and open to the Pacific Ocean. The mouth of the bay is flanked by rocky headlands – Tenacatita to the north and Punta el Estrecho (Narrow Point) to the south – on Google Earth they look like great places to dive. We arrived in La Manzanilla at the beginning of the summer rainy season when most of the “snowbirds” from Canada and the U.S. had returned home.

Fishermen launching a panga from Playa La Manzanilla

La Manzanilla had 1,305 people in the 2010 census (link). Six percent of the people did not have a floor and seven percent had only one room. Ninety-four percent of the households had “sanitary installations,” 92% had municipal water and electricity, 69% had a washing machine, 89% had at least one television and 16% had a computer. The average person completed 7 years of school and 12% had “visited and finished” college (link).

La Manzanilla downtown

Hotel in La Manzanilla

Before the Mexican Revolution, La Manzanilla was part of a large, privately-owned hacienda. After the revolution, the hacienda was given to the locals to farm (link). The economy is based on fishing, farming, ranching and tourism (link).

Pangas on Playa La Manzanilla

Fishermen's cooperative sells fresh fish

We often got up early and went running or walking on the beach – 5 km (3 mi) of barefoot-quality sand from La Manzanilla to Boca de Iguanas (Mouth of the Iguanas). The air was calm and cool compared to the heat and humidity of mid-day. People were sweeping their stores and sidewalks and setting up tables with merchandise in the street. We saw small delivery trucks and people on bicycles as we walked through the quiet town.

Early morning in La Manzanilla

Beach toys waiting for tourists in La Manzanilla

On the beach, people were raking the sand around the tables and umbrellas of restaurants, and stray dogs were looking for handouts. Occasionally we passed an old, barefoot gringo walking a dog or a couple local women jogging in bright spandex suits, but the beach was usually deserted. 

Early morning on Playa La Manzanilla

Early morning on Playa La Manzanilla

Several times we walked the long walk to the end of the beach past the cemetery (cementerio) on a sand dune.

Cementerio in the dunes

Cementerio in the dunes

Past an abandoned RV campground.

Abandoned RV campground

Abandoned RV campground

To Boca de Iguanas where we met one of the locals hanging out in the shade.

Green iguana about 1 m (3 ft) long

Boca de Iguanas has a small hotel-restaurant, a couple palapa restaurants on the beach and a place for RV and tent camping. The Chantli Mare is a luxury boutique hotel and restaurant created from a dilapidated home above the beach (link).

Chantli Mare hotel and restaurant

In the cave at the base of the rock outcrop is a shrine to someone who lived in the area. And there are several smaller shrines on the rock outcrop itself.

Shrine in the cave at the base of the rock outcrop

Shrine on the rock outcrop

Shrine on the rock outcrop

Mid-morning we’d walk into town to buy groceries or pastries or barbecued chicken (pollo asado) for dinner. The guy who sells pollo asado has a 50-gal drum cut in half for a grill under a ramada on a corner a block from the beach. He grills fresh chickens on a wood fire in the morning for the lunch crowd and again in the afternoon for the dinner crowd. You can eat it at a picnic table under the ramada or he'll pack it up and you can take it home. A whole chicken with rice and tomato soup cost $90 MXN ($7.50 USD). Muy rico (very tasty).

Pollo asado is sold at the palapa on the corner

We stopped at Robert’s Deli for baked goods; his wife’s scones were our favorite. When he wasn’t too busy, he talked to us about the area. They’re from Canada and have been coming to La Manzanilla for seven years, the last four of which they’ve lived in La Manzanilla full time. They lease a small shop on the main street a block from the beach and they lease a house with no air conditioning nearby. 

Houses in La Manzanilla

House in La Manzanilla

Robert said he wouldn’t buy in La Manzanilla because an ejido (land cooperative) comprising a dozen families controls the land and collects 5% of the purchase price on house sales and an annual tax from leases. He mentioned the uncertain politics and difficulty of maintaining a house if you don’t live in it year round. He also said that the summer heat was brutal without air conditioning.

The "Helping Hands Bookstore" (center of the flower is an electric meter)

I asked Robert about flooding during storms. He said that during Hurricane Jova in 2011 (link), water came up to the sidewalk in front of his shop and that the 1995 tsunami nearly destroyed the building (the upper floors had to be rebuilt).

House in La Manzanilla

House on Playa La Manzanilla

On October 9, 1995, an 8.0 earthquake ruptured 200 km (124 mi) of an offshore fault setting off a tsunami with a landward run-up of 1-5 m (3-16 ft) along the Pacific coast of central Mexico. The most damage occurred in Bahía Tenacatita. La Manzanilla was flooded to more than 2 m (6 ft) up to 200 m (650 ft) inland. Residents reported that water in the bay receded several hundred meters before returning “like a fast-rising tide” (link). The Bahía Tenacatita Hotel on the beach near Boca de Iguanas was destroyed and never rebuilt.

Abandoned Bahía Tenacatita Hotel

Abandoned Bahía Tenacatita Hotel

One morning, I followed two older guys down the beach on a low tide; one had a thrownet, the other a plastic shopping bag for the catch. The man with the net was fishing the shallow trough between the sandbar where the waves were breaking and the steep face of the beach. 

I could see schools of small, silvery fish swimming in less than a foot of water moving in and out with the surf. I followed the fishermen for half an hour; they made a dozen sets and caught fish in half of them. 

Only one set produced a decent catch – more than 20 fish – of mostly juveniles from three species: golden trevally (jurel dorado), striped mullet (lisa rayada) and yellow bobo (bobo amarillo). They kept the trevallies and lisas and returned the bobos to the water. 

Mexicans often keep watch dogs to guard their property and large, barking dogs are certainly a deterrent to would-be thieves. But many of the guard dogs we've encountered in our travels were small, even tiny, and hardly a deterrent. In the end, we decided that small dogs are noisy enough to alert their owners to intruders and cheaper to feed than large ones. Here's a sample of small watch dogs that accosted us on our walks around La Manzanilla.

Along the Pacific Coast, bare metal rusts from exposure to moisture and salt air, and must be painted regularly to avoid structural problems. This includes the ubiquitous cellphone towers. We watched as a crew of four men painted the local cell tower. It took them two weeks to sandblast and paint the red and white tower. The wind often blew more than 20 mph (notice the whitecaps on the bay in the picture), but that did not stop them.

Painting the cellphone tower in La Manzanilla

The Search for a Strong Box

The house we rented in La Manzanilla belonged to an older gringo from California. It was two stories, large and airy with a palapa on the roof that had a great view of the bay. The owner built the house for his retirement, only he had decided that he couldn’t retire and now the house was up for sale for over $300K. While we were moving in, the manager told us that someone had broken into the house several weeks earlier. Some of the windows had screened shutters, but no glass; you could easily put your fist through them to gain access. The manager’s two-story house, which was next door, had metal bars on all of the windows.

We rented this house in La Mazanilla

Months earlier we had rented a house in Bucerias that was broken into within days of our arrival. While we were moving in, the owners said they were improving security, but they didn’t say why. A couple days later, they installed a small safe in the bedroom. We had the first-floor of a duplex and learned from the couple upstairs that they had been robbed a few days before we arrived. Someone had scaled the 3-m (10-ft) wall surrounding the property, walked up the stairs, entered their unlocked house and took $200 Canadian from the woman’s purse on the kitchen table. She was eating dinner on the balcony and he was swimming in the pool when it happened.

Fast forward a week and we were having dinner on the patio when a young man climbed the wall and entered our house. People on a second-floor balcony across the street began yelling, which alerted our next-door neighbor, who came and pounded on our gate, which got my attention. We didn’t lose anything. Apparently when he opened the door, the kid saw us on the patio and didn’t go any farther into the house. I never saw him; he hopped over the side wall and disappeared.

In La Manzanilla, we locked our electronics, cameras and documents in the truck when we left the house, which became annoying, so we decided to get a box that could be locked and chained to something. The best we could do in the local ferreterías (hardware stores) was a small, sheet-metal tool box, which could be opened with a pry bar.  We drove to Manzanillo 60 km (37 mi) to the south, but couldn’t find anything suitable there either. 

Soldador (welder) and strong box

On the way back from Manzanillo, I stopped at a soldadura (welding shop) outside of Melaque and described what we wanted. The owner showed us a tool box that his father, also a welder, had made several decades before. Quiero lo mismo (I want the same thing). He asked for a diagram, which I drew complete with measurements, handles, hinges and hasp on a sheet of paper. He said it would cost $2,000 MXN ($160 USD) for materials and labor and take five days to build and paint. I gave him $1,000 MXN up front. A week later we had a box with true corners and a lid that overlaps the base with a tolerance less than 2 mm. It’s heavy, but bombproof; an example of welding craftsmanship. We always use it. 

Pet parrot in the store where we bought our groceries

If you've driven in Mexico, you've seen that virtually every bridge has a name. Even small bridges over modest arroyos get a couple signs with names. Bridges are named for local communities, geographic features, regional landmarks or historic events and people. The bridge in the picture below is on Federal Highway 200 north of La Manzanilla. I love the irony.

The sign translates to "Bridge Without a Name"

I’ll write more about La Manzanilla, the crocodile reserve and diving in "the aquarium" in upcoming posts.

Sunset over Bahía Tenacatita from the roof or our house in La Manzanilla