Huatulco, Puerto Angel, Zipolite

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Oaxaca, Mexico Travelogue
Posted by SurfMexico Editor

September 13, 2000 – Huatulco to Puerto Escondido (Continued from the Oaxaca to Puerto Angel Entry)

Today’s travels take us from the Puerto Angel-Huatulco area down a short stretch of coast to Puerto Escondido.

Puerto Angel is a simple fishing village on a small bay about 40 kms north of what is now the new tourist center of the Bahías de Huatulco. The town lies on and between two small protected beaches where the local fishermen station their boats. Enramadas along the beach offer cold refreshments and seafood, and in the mornings you can pick up your fresh dorado or red snapper by the whole fish, right there on the beach. In the distant past, Pto. Angel was an important port, dealing mainly in coffee export.

From Puerto Angel we first drove over the hill to Zipolite, a stretch of open beach just to the north that gained fame during the 60′s and 70′s as a secluded, hard to reach nudist beach where people came to free themselves from the constraints of civilization and let it all hang out.

Zipolite’s beach is now totally lined with bungalows and bed and breakfasts, palapa restaurants offering French crepes and Italian pastas and pizzas and as well as the standard seafood fare, and such amenities as a paved road, taxi service, electricity, telephones and even fax and internet connections.

After breakfasting on the beach and noticing that despite its growth and changes, the settlement still attracted a lot of young backpackers and adventure travelers, we left at 10:30 a.m. for a drive south along Hwy 200 to the Bahías de Huatulco, which took about 45 minutes on an excellent but curvy road.

When I was here in the 80′s, Huatulco itself was nothing more than a series of natural, largely uninhabited coves and bays with roadwork just beginning to be started for the new project. It has now been transformed into one of Mexico’s major tourist resorts.

Huatulco now boasts of a marina, large commercial areas, a golf course, and many first-rate hotels, all spread out along its kilometers of bays and interspersed with pods of nature. Its residential sectors, too, are expanding rapidly.

Inland from the area of tourist development is the town of La Crucecita (Santa Cruz de Huatulco), with its typical square and church hosting what we were told it reputed to be the largest image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in existence. Walking into the church, we saw on the altar an image of the Virgin of fairly standard dimensions, and were a bit puzzled. Upon asking a local resident, the fellow walked us back inside and raised his head – there painted on the ceiling was, indeed, the largest vision of the Guadalupe that we had ever seen.

Heading now north along Hwy.200 toward Puerto Escondido, where we again planned to spend the night, we took the turnoff not far up to coast toward Mazunte.When Mazunte was first settled, it was the home of farmers and fishermen. It was also the home of a sea turtle slaughterhouse.

Following the implementation of laws prohibiting the killing of sea turtles and consumption of their eggs, Mazunte has made a complete turn-around and is now the home of the Centro Mexicano de la Tortuga, or Mexican Turtle Center.The center, covering 4 hectares, holds every species of marine turtle inhabiting the Mexican coast, as well as 6 species of river turtle and 2 typesof native land turtles. The installation includes large outdoor tanks, an aquarium and incubation facilities. It is open to the public Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. – 4:30 p.m., and Sundays from 10 to 2:30 p.m.

Also in Mazunte is a natural cosmetics factory, situated on the main road near the Turtle sanctuary. Here you can find shampoos and conditioners, face and body creams and much more, all made from naturally occurring ingredients of the area.

At the Centro Mexicano de la Tortuga we learned that about 20 km north up Hwy.200 was an Iguanario (Iguana sanctuary), right before crossing the Cozoaltepec River bridge at Barra del Potrero. The Iguanario, run by a young, local family, consists of a simple fenced-off area (to keep visitors out rather than to keep the iguanas in) holding a great number of mature iguanas, beside which are a series of raised cages holding scads of babies, and where they’ll live until they’re old enough to be released into the larger pen with no danger. According to our young “guide”, there are a total of some 1,800 iguanas in the preserve. Once the iguanas are older and well-enough established, they are released into the wild once again.

Most of the iguanas in the preserve are green iguanas, although we did see a couple of the black species peeking out from between the rocks. Apparently the green iguanas are much better as “pets”, both because they have a better disposition and are vegetarians, which means their caretakers don’t have to go out foraging after insects and such.

Back on the highway to Puerto Escondido, which really wasn’t more than about 1/2 and hour away, we crossed several large rivers swollen with the recent rains that had been falling in the coastal mountains. Rolling into the Playa Zicatela area just south of the town, we immediately made our way out to the sand to watch the many surfers out in the waves at Puerto Escondido’s prime surf spot.

After sunset, since we wanted to be up early the following morning to again see what the surfers were able to catch at the first part of the day, we settled into one of the many small hotels on Zicatela and later went into town, perched on the adjoining hillside, for a stroll through Escondido’s downtown district. Full of surf shops, T-shirt and Oaxacan textile vendors, and seafood restaurants, there seemed to be many more people along the beach at Zicatela than in the downtown area… but then again, this was the middle of the low season.

Tomorrow will be our last day on the road, as we make the final run north through Acapulco to our home in Zihuatanejo.