Zihuatanejo, Mexico: this summer's surf spot
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In the pantheon of Mexican holiday towns, Zihuatanejo is a hard one to categorise. I have visited it, and the nearby small Pacific Coast surf towns of Sayulita and Troncones, a handful of times over two decades. Change here is rare and slow. The fact that this part of Guerrero – closer to Guatemala than the USA – isn’t easy to get to has surely played a role: unlike Cancún, it requires at least one stopover.
- Julien Capmeil
Above: La Casa Que Canta
The terrain has also done its part. This swathe of the state is slammed up against the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains, with steep cliffs and ravines blanketed by mangrove, oak and black olive, and tangled with subtropical shrubs, agaves and snaking vines. None of this is conducive to the type of sprawling hotels you find in flatter parts of the county. Zihua, as it’s thankfully shortened to, is especially hemmed in by nature – by the scooped-out bay to the west, with its sliver of silt-fine beach and palm trees, and by hills in every other direction. The small stuccoed places to stay, covered in magenta and egg-yolk-yellow bougainvillaea, and the thatch-roofed private homes that do exist are daringly set on dramatic inclines.
- Julien Capmeil
Above: Road signs in Troncones
This is not to say that the place has stayed away from the babble. The historic cobblestone streets downtown are lined with restaurants and a scattering of shops catering to gringos looking to bring back a bottle of tequila or a bright woven serape shawl. But there’s also a bustling central market hawking everything from freshly plucked chickens to socks; for every bar announcing a happy-hour special, there’s a lunch cart selling steamed tamales that signposts everyday life in a way not seen in Mayakoba or Playa del Carmen. In the 1950s and 60s, it was this mix of escapism and grit, this world caught between holidays and real life, that attracted Hollywood actors and musicians who wanted sun and sea but not the scene of Acapulco or Puerto Vallarta. John Wayne, Lauren Hutton, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards all found their way to Zihuatanejo, and for a few trippy summers in the early 1960s, Timothy Leary took over the Hotel Catalina and set up a psychedelic training centre where students, in keeping with his counterculture credo, could ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’.
- Julien Capmeil
Above: Surfing at La Saladita
In the following years it became a little less rock’n’roll, but recently the
town has started to attract a groovier type of traveller again – surfers, artists, wandering entrepreneurs who, like the Sixties crowd, want the amazing beaches without the self-consciousness of Sayulita or Tulum. It was this total lack of pretension and slowed-down pace – the fact that you could share a ridiculously long left-peeling wave with local surfers without the hooting found at breaks that have been taken over by visitors – that initially brought me here. - Julien Capmeil
Above: La Raíz de la Tierra restaurant
Twenty years on, days here still unfold refreshingly slowly. Despite that great breaking left, this is at heart a fishing town. No-frills panga boats push out before sunrise, followed by the sport fishers at first light, leaving the calm of silver-pink Zihuatanejo Bay for deeper, darker waters in the hope of landing marlin, dorado and those maddeningly elusive, lightning-fast sailfish with their pointy, hard-to-hook beaks. Roosters and the muffled sounds of clanging pots make things official, and soon the smell of woodsmoke and coffee, and the aroma of onions and serrano peppers frying in vegetable oil – a scent that will continue until supper – fills the air.
- Julien Capmeil
Above: Cangrejo y Toro
At 8.30 on a Thursday morning, Carmelita’s Café, squeezed onto busy Calle Heróico Colegio Militar, is buzzing. There are wizened matriarchs dressed for the occasion, with two, sometimes three, generations in tow. Longtime visitors who return religiously are joined by travellers who had the good fortune to wander in for the first time, not knowing they’d discovered the town’s only breakfast institution. Carmelita herself is effortlessly convivial, with one of those unlined faces that make it impossible to guess her age (40? 60?). She democratically greets everyone and cranks out plate after plate of huevos a la pasilla (fried eggs in tortilla cups with refried beans and plantains, smothered in a tangy pasilla-chilli sauce) while remaining perfectly coiffed, her red lipstick bright, her white, flower-embroidered shirt spotless. Carmelita’s, like Zihua in general, remains largely run by Mexicans for Mexicans, while graciously including the rest of us.
- Julien Capmeil
Above: Fish tacos at Lourdes
The best way to take the pulse of a Mexican town is to head to its central market – the earlier in the day, the better. Zihua’s mercado municipal in the heart of downtown is intoxicating, a total sensory overload: labyrinthine rows of stalls showcasing fire-orange mangoes and prickly pears piled into high towers, tables of just-picked herbs with their roots attached, stands selling dried beans, ground spices and enormous straw hats. But then there’s the yeasty scent of fresh-baked bread and a whiff of cinnamon, and everyone abandons whatever they strolled in here for in pursuit of pan dulce. Today, there’s also a run on pork and molar-sized kernels of maize, the two building blocks of pozole. In Zihua and much of Guerrero, Thursday is still pozole day, a time-honoured ritual that all but shuts the town down from 2pm to 5pm as locals gather in pozolerías and at home to slurp up the intensely savoury pork soup punctuated with pumpkin seeds, the epazote herb and the hard-to-define hoja santa – a staple in Mexican cooking that tastes like minty liquorice. It’s garnished with radish, lime, onion and more pork in the form of salty, Styrofoam-light chicharrones (fried pig skin).
- Julien Capmeil
Above: Amuleto hotel
Those not taking soup seriously on a Thursday afternoon are at the beach. Las Gatas is the most remote of Zihua’s four, reachable from town by a sweaty 30-minute hike along a rocky trail that dead-ends at a shrine to the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe or a short boat ride. The beach itself is a slip of white sand around a cyan-blue lagoon made for dozing while floating on your back. Out of season, it’s quiet. Quiet enough to order a beer and rent a snorkel at the last palapa, then walk south along a barely visible footpath, parting waist-high shrubs and swerving the occasional iguana sunning itself. It’s empty except for the crumbling remains of a nature centre that Owen Lee, a naturalist and cameraman to Jacques Cousteau, built in the late 1960s, plus some deserted fishing cabanas that are gradually being consumed by the jungle. And it is tranquil, despite the cacophony of birdsong that nearly drowns out the waves breaking against the rocks. It’s heaven to throw a beach towel down on one of the sandy patches and read for a few hours, getting up every so often to move under the shade of a coconut palm, to wade into the sea to spot puffer fish and Sergeant majors with their five black stripes – and to see if that shadow on the horizon was a humpback whale, here for the weather like everyone else.
- Julien Capmeil
Above: A custom motorbike at Loot
If Zihua on first glimpse appears caught in amber, on a deeper inspection it’s really only set in honey. ‘No one was tapping into the town’s more bohemian history, and no one was trying to pull in the sort of younger, globe-trotting traveller we knew would also love it here,’ says Tara Medina who opened Loot, a café, surf and barber shop, art gallery and restaurant, together with her partner, the architect Andrés Saavedra, five years ago. ‘So we decided to change the story.’ An airy three-level lofted building, Loot is colossal in this town of tiny spaces (six-room hotels, 10-seat restaurants, wardrobe-sized shops); its bright floor-to-ceiling Pop-art mural a modern, urban jolt in a place awash with folk crafts and Mexicana.
- Julien Capmeil
Above: The Loot café
At 5pm on a Friday, the waitress in the terrace café, wearing a fitted blush-pink jumpsuit and rocking the choppy, super-short fringe that only those under 25 can pull off, serves shots of espresso, Paloma cocktails and bottles of Modelo beer. She moves easily between those who are still clinging to the work week, including the dreadlocked expat app-developer tapping away on his laptop in noise-cancelling headphones, and the tables of locals and visitors who have moved on to the weekend. Mexican hip-hop is playing and the faint scent of pomade from Les Enfants Terribles barber shop mixes with the smell of freshly chopped coriander wafting down from the rooftop restaurant where chef Robert Sieber, just back from a few seasons at Montauk’s Breakers and Surf Lodge, prepares for the dinner crowd.
- Julien Capmeil
Above: La Casa MX
At least from the outside, it seems that Loot is successfully rewriting Zihua’s narrative. Since the multi-functional space was opened, the company has picked up another partner, become involved in architecture and design and started hosting events such as Mexi Log, an annual week-long surf competition and music festival in La Saladita, forty minutes north of Zihua. This is also where Loot took over long-standing beach café Lourdes, hippifying the interior and bringing in a wood-burning pizza oven. Two years ago, it opened La Casa MX in Zihua as a six-room bed-and-breakfast for visiting surfers and artists that is now a minimal, modern boutique hotel with white-washed walls, wood accents, pebble floors and an outdoor tub.
- Julien Capmeil
Above: A bedroom at Thompson
Loot has also paved the way for several new endeavours by young
local entrepreneurs, including a vegan farmers’ market, a mezcal brand, and a craft brewery and tasting room. Alongside the Carmelita’s of the town, handlebar-mustachioed chef Miguel Baltazar now whips up scallop crudo with cucumber and tangerine, and lemongrass crème brûlée with burnt palm sugar at the Thompson hotel. The same brand brought some much-needed sex appeal to Cabo when it opened The Cape a few years back, and the Thompson, which took over the old Viceroy hotel in the centre of Zihua’s sweeping La Ropa beach, could be viewed as a physical manifestation of the town’s next chapter. The structure’s predictable orange stucco exterior was painted a fresh off-white, with pops of navy and modern touches of barro negro clay light fixtures and furniture from Mexico City-based Casa Studio. But seeing the way other Mexican towns have gone from secret to sceney to played-out, it’s difficult to know exactly what to wish for with Zihua. For now, it still remains suspended in that golden middle ground – slowed down, salty and sun-kissed, but with enough grit to keep alive the fantasy of maybe one day moving here.British Airways (ba.com) and Aeromexico (aeromexico.com) fly from London Heathrow to Mexico City, from where Zihuatanejo is a one-hour flight
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