Puerto Vallarta vs Riviera Nayarit: One Bay, Two Answers

Two houses, an hour apart, on the same bay. In the first one you are inside a gate, the golf course is on your right, and at six the only sound is the surf and somebody mixing drinks. In the second you walk out of the front door, down a hill, and you are in a town having dinner on a street with music on it. Both of those are a good week. They are not the same week, and the mistake is to choose between them on a photograph.

Banderas Bay is one bay with a state line across it. Jalisco on the south side, Nayarit on the north, and the airport sits almost exactly where the two meet.

What the numbers actually say

Everything below comes from our own listings, so you can hold it against the brochures.

Read that second row twice. Nayarit has more than twice as many of our houses; Vallarta has nearly all of the staff. Forty-nine of fifty-four Vallarta houses come with the chef in the rate. That is not a coincidence and it is not marketing — it is how the two sides of this bay price a house.

Puerto Vallarta: the town is the point

You are in a town. The town is the point of staying here, more than the beach is. 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 of families and nobody is going anywhere. Cross the river and you are in the Zona Romántica — the old quarter south of the Cuale, where the restaurant streets are, and which the tourism board itself calls the only gay district of any destination in Latin America.

Where you eat is the reason to be on this side, and so is the depth of it: the seafood places where the catch is on ice at the door, the taco stands on Olas Altas, the long dinners on Basilio Badillo. The evening has shows and music in it if you want them.

And in the house, somebody is cooking. Villa Mandarinas up above Mismaloya — sixteen bedrooms, thirty-four people — lists two chefs, two bartenders, two waiters, three housekeepers and a night guard who lives on the property, working Sundays at no extra charge. That is the normal shape of a Vallarta house, not the exception.

Vallarta is the answer for a group that wants to walk out and be somewhere, for anybody who cares about dinner, and for a group of any size that wants the house staffed without arguing about it.

Riviera Nayarit: the gate, the golf and the boat

Up the north shore the coast changes character about twenty minutes past the airport. Nuevo Nayarit, then Bucerías, then La Cruz de Huanacaxtle with its marina, and at the end of the headland the Punta Mita peninsula, forty-five to sixty minutes from the terminal. There is a gate. Behind it there is golf, there are beach clubs and there is almost nothing else, which is exactly the point.

The Riviera Nayarit's own tourism board is honest about the evening: it describes its coast as quaint bars, pubs and cantinas, and tells anyone who wants to be out until dawn to go to Puerto Vallarta. We agree with the board. You come here to be left alone.

What you do instead is get on the water. The Marietas are two islands off the point — Redonda and Larga — and they have been a national park since 2005, a Ramsar wetland since 2004, a World Heritage site since 2005 and a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 2008. You go by boat with an operator CONANP has licensed, you swim, snorkel, dive or sit on the sand, and that is all you do: no alcohol inside the park, no other activity permitted. The seabirds nest in their thousands and in winter the humpbacks are around the boat. It is the best morning on this coast and it is run properly, which is why it is still worth having.

Inside the gates the houses are big and quiet. Casa Koko is nine bedrooms and twenty people with a house manager, butler service for ten hours a day, a chef and sous-chef from nine until nine and four waiters. North of the gates, Sayulita is thirty-eight kilometres up from the airport — a Pueblo Mágico, a surf town of five thousand people, and a different proposition again.

Nayarit is the answer for a group that wants to be looked after and left alone, for golfers, for surfers, and for anyone who finds a town at night tiring rather than interesting.

When to come, and what the bay is doing

From the middle of December to the end of March the humpbacks are in the bay. They come down from Alaska to breed and to calve, and because Banderas Bay is deep and wide they come well inside it — from a terrace on either side you can watch them with a coffee and no boat at all. CONANP records the same winter season out at the Marietas. If whales matter to somebody in the group, that is the window.

The rest of the year the bay is warm and the question is only which side. Summer is hotter and greener and it rains in the afternoon; the water is at its best and the houses are at their quietest.

The honest steer

If your group is going to eat out three nights of seven, stay in Puerto Vallarta. If you want to leave the gate twice all week, go to Punta Mita. If you cannot decide, the chef decides it: forty-nine houses out of fifty-four on one side, seventy-five out of a hundred and twenty-eight on the other.

Start with our fully staffed houses in Puerto Vallarta or our houses in Punta Mita, and tell Rocío which of the two paragraphs above sounds like your group. You fly into the same airport either way — you fly to Puerto Vallarta for both.