Punta Mita With Children: Kids Clubs, Pools and the Cart

The nine-year-old asks at breakfast whether she can take the golf cart to the courts on her own. You look at the road outside the house — no pavement, no traffic, a security gate half a mile back, a man on a bicycle going slowly nowhere — and you say yes, which is not a sentence you have said on any previous holiday.

That is the part of Punta Mita that does not photograph, and it is the reason families come back to it.

What comes with the house, and what does not

Behind the gate almost nothing is bought at a door. The arrangement is a membership that the stay carries, and it is what opens the beach clubs themselves, the two golf courses, the tennis, pickleball and paddle courts, the gym, the pilates studio, the jogging paths, the pier — and, on eighteen of our houses' own listings, a kids club.

So the question that matters is not "what is there for children in Punta Mita". It is "does this house's listing name the membership", and the answer is on the page.

The pool, and why it wins

Here is the honest thing about the Pacific on this peninsula. It is warm, it is clean, it is beautiful, and it has a shore break that is too much for small children. Plenty of beaches here are calm; the one in front of your house may not be, depending which side of the point you are on.

Which is why the club pool, not the sea, is what a family with small children actually uses, with the sea thirty metres further on for the adults and the teenagers. Nobody tells you this in advance. It changes which house you should book.

What the kids club actually is

It is a room and a team, and on the listings it sits in the same breath as the pilates studio — one of ours says it plainly: Kupuri's pilates studio and kids club. Another simply lists kids club access. Houses inside the Four Seasons enclave, like Four Seasons Twin Villas, describe the resort's own instead.

Use it for the middle of the day, which is the right answer anyway. Children go off at noon; the adults have the two-hour lunch that is the entire point of being in Mexico; everybody reconvenes at four in better humour than they parted.

About spas

No listing of ours names a spa at any of these clubs, so this story does not name one either.

What our data does carry, on house after house, is the treatment arranged at the house at an additional cost — which is what most of our guests pick regardless. A table on the terrace, the hour after the beach rather than the hour instead of it. Tell the house manager the night before and it happens while the children are at the club.

The afternoon nobody plans

The courts are quiet enough that you can walk on. The jogging paths are empty at six in the morning and at six in the evening. There is a pier. There are carts, and children work out the cart rules in about an hour.

Punta Mita with kids goes further into the week-by-week of it. The short version is that the peninsula is built as a place where people are left alone, and that turns out to suit a family better than it suits anyone else.

The houses that carry it

Casa Balena at La Punta Estates — six bedrooms for twelve, chef included, and its own listing names the clubs, the courts, the gym, the kids club, the jogging paths, the pier and the tee times. Villa Amistad at Porta Fortuna, four bedrooms for twelve, names Kupuri's pilates studio and kids club specifically. Casa Happy Paws takes eighteen, with a house manager, a chef and kitchen staff, and the clubs on its list.

Of our hundred and twenty-eight houses in Punta Mita, seventy-five come with the chef in the rate, which for a family is the difference between a holiday and a fortnight of catering.

Start with our fully staffed houses in Punta Mita and tell Rocío the ages of the children, because that decides the pool before it decides anything else.