La Marigalante: Puerto Vallarta’s Pirate Ship Today

At about half past nine on a winter evening the ship comes back in and stops a few hundred metres off the malecón, and then the sky over it goes up. People eating dinner along the waterfront look round. Children on the sea wall start shouting. It has been one of the fixed points of a Puerto Vallarta evening for years, and from a terrace on the south shore you can watch the whole thing without leaving the house.

What almost nobody realises, including several pages still on the internet, is that the ship doing it is not the ship that used to.

The ship that is on the seabed

The operator's own account of it is unusually frank, and worth quoting rather than paraphrasing: on 10 October 2025, "after a life of glorious service, our valiant vessel completed its final journey. It now rests on the seabed of the bay it so loved, becoming an eternal guardian of its waters, a new mystery for the ocean."

So the original Marigalante — the dark-hulled galleon in every photograph taken in Vallarta for years, the one under the fireworks on the postcards — is gone, and it is down there.

We are leaving that photograph on this page because it is the ship most readers have in their heads.

The ship that sails now

The replacement has a better story than most ships do, and it is on the ship's own page.

She was built in Mazatlán in 2008 and called the Jolly Roger. She worked Puerto Vallarta from 2009, moved to Cancún in 2013, and stayed on the Caribbean side for a decade. When her sister ship went down, she sailed back — from Cancún to Puerto Vallarta, through the Panama Canal — and took her name. She is La Marigalante II.

What you are getting on board is, by the operator's own description, a replica of the Santa María built in metal with wooden cladding: about 800 tons, three masts, four decks, and a capacity of 240 passengers. There is a main dining room for a hundred with air conditioning, a full stainless-steel galley and a proper bar, two tenders, a couple of inflatable bananas and two hundred sets of mask and fins in the lockers.

That last detail tells you most of what you need to know. This is a working excursion vessel that happens to look like a sixteenth-century galleon, not a floating museum. It is also the reason the day tour works.

The night tour, and the fireworks

The night tour — it is called Pirates of the Bay — runs about four hours on Banderas Bay at sunset.

The shape of it: you sail out as the light goes, there is a full pirate show with combat, acrobatics, music and dancing, there is dinner with a meat, poultry, fish or vegetarian option, and the bar is open throughout. Then the ship comes back in, anchors in front of the malecón, and the fireworks go off.

It is loud, it is broad, and it is not trying to be anything else. For a group of fourteen with teenagers in it, or for the one night when the adults have run out of ideas, it is the easiest evening in Vallarta to organise, and the show is good at what it does. If your week is otherwise quiet dinners on a terrace, this is the deliberate exception.

The malecón is also where you can watch it for nothing, which is a perfectly respectable plan on a second night.

The day tour, which goes to Majahuitas

The day tour — Pirate Land — is the one almost nobody knows about.

It sails south to Majahuitas, which is one of the beaches you can only reach by boat: the Puerto Vallarta tourism board lists it among the coves south of the city with no road to them, reachable by panga from Los Muertos Pier or Boca de Tomatlán. Arriving there on an 800-ton galleon rather than in a six-seat open boat is a different kind of morning.

The operator's own list for the day: breakfast on board, Mexican or American, with the bar open from the start; the pirate show while you sail; then at Majahuitas, snorkelling with a mask included — a snorkel tube is extra and paid on the boat, which is the sort of detail worth knowing before somebody is standing in the water — plus kayaks, the banana boat, and treasure hunts for the children. Lunch on the beach, then the bar again on the way back.

For a family group this is the better of the two. The children are occupied for the day by people whose job that is, and the adults get a beach with no road to it.

Where it leaves from, and getting there

The operator publishes its address and it is in the Zona Hotelera: H. Escuela Naval Militar s/n, Área Militar de Vallarta. Both tours are booked ahead and both are timed — the night one around sunset, the day one across the middle of the day.

From a house on the south shore it is a drive across town, and the simplest version is the one where you do not drive it: the house manager books the car for the hour you need to leave and the hour you expect to be back, which on the night tour is after a long dinner and an open bar. How you get around covers the rest.

Villa Mandarinas, with its own pier, and Casa Morada on the south shore both put you on the right side of town for it — and both have a terrace you can watch the fireworks from on the nights you decide not to go.

Start with our fully staffed houses in Puerto Vallarta and tell Rocío which of the two tours the group is actually for; they are not the same evening at all.