Sayulita vs Puerto Vallarta: A Town of 5,000 or a City?

In Sayulita at eight in the evening a man is grilling fish on the pavement, there is a saxophone two doors up, and the thing that passes you on the cobbles is a golf cart with five people in it. In Puerto Vallarta at eight, a thousand people are walking the malecón in both directions, somebody is doing a fire act by the arches, and the restaurant you want has a forty-minute wait.

Both of those are a good night. Choosing between them is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of arithmetic — how many nights you are here, how many of you there are, and whether somebody is cooking.

The geography, briefly

Sayulita is thirty-eight kilometres north of the Puerto Vallarta airport, which the Riviera Nayarit tourism board calls less than an hour by car; its press kit says thirty-five minutes from the town. It is in Nayarit, across the state line; Vallarta is in Jalisco. Both are on the Pacific, forty minutes apart, with the airport roughly in the middle.

So this is not a choice about where in Mexico to go. It is a choice about what the evening looks like.

Sayulita: four streets and a plaza

A fishing town of five thousand people, in the board's own count, and a Pueblo Mágico officially. The streets are cobbled, there are more golf carts than cars, and the whole of the town you will use is about four blocks square around a plaza.

The surf is the reason most people first come — the board puts the best of it from December through April, when the north swells arrive, and the beaches run from beginner to advanced. The rest of it is a market, art galleries, Wixárika beadwork, a sunset everyone turns to watch, and after dark music in the street rather than in a venue.

What it does not have is depth. Four or five restaurants you will return to, a handful of bars, one beach. By day four you know the town, which some groups find restful and others find short.

Sayulita is the answer for surfers, for a group under about ten who want to walk everywhere, for anyone who wants Mexico loud and small and close up, and for a week where nobody has an agenda.

Puerto Vallarta: a town that goes on after dinner

A real town where the town is the point of being there. The malecón runs 1,300 metres along the water from the Hotel Rosita to the Río Cuale, and at ten at night it is full. Cross the river into the Zona Romántica and the restaurant streets start — Basilio Badillo, Olas Altas — and the tourism board calls this the only destination in Latin America with its own gay district.

Where you eat is the real difference between the two towns. Vallarta has a restaurant culture most beach towns do not, and you could eat somewhere different every night for a fortnight. The evening has theatre and music in it if you want them, and boats to the villages with no road leave from the pier at the end of the beach.

The Riviera Nayarit's own tourism board agrees, which is the most useful sentence in this story. The board's own press kit describes its entire coast — Sayulita included — as quaint bars, pubs and cantinas, and tells anyone who wants to be out all night to go to Puerto Vallarta's malecón, El Centro and Olas Altas.

Puerto Vallarta is the answer for a group of more than about ten, for anyone who cares about dinner, for a first trip to Mexico, and for any week where somebody in the party would like a choice.

The houses, and the thing the brochures never compare

This is where the decision actually gets made, and it is not close.

In Puerto Vallarta the chef is normal. Forty-nine of our fifty-four houses there include one in the rate, from Villa Veranda — four bedrooms, Talavera pottery, a walled garden and a private courtyard entrance — up to Villa Mandarinas at sixteen bedrooms with two chefs, two bartenders, two waiters, three housekeepers and a night guard who lives on the property.

In Sayulita we have four houses and none of them includes a chef. Casa Ensueño is on the Northside with a cathedral-ceilinged dining room and murals by a named artist; Treehouse and Casa Poseidon are up at Punta Sayulita with beach-club access and, on Treehouse, a golf cart included. They are lovely and they are small, and the cook is something you arrange rather than something you get.

That one row of the table is the honest verdict. If the week is built around twenty people eating together every night, it is Vallarta and it is not an argument.

Who should actually go where

Go to Sayulita if your group is four to ten, if somebody surfs, if you want to be able to walk home from everything, and if you are happy to eat out most nights or hire a cook.

Go to Puerto Vallarta if there are more than ten of you, if the house is meant to feed everybody, if anyone in the group wants a town rather than a village, or if this is the trip that is meant to convince somebody that Mexico is worth it.

Do both if you have ten days. Base in one, drive forty minutes the other way twice: Sayulita for the market and lunch, Vallarta for the malecón and one long dinner. How you get around is simple on both sides of the line.

Start with our fully staffed houses in Puerto Vallarta, and if the Sayulita paragraph is the one that sounds like your group, tell Rocío and she will send you the four.