Snorkeling in Punta Mita: Where the Water Actually Clears

You go in off the back of the boat on the sheltered side of the island, and for about four seconds there is nothing but your own bubbles. Then the water settles and there are perhaps three hundred small orange fish between you and the rock, all facing the same way, entirely uninterested in you.

Twenty minutes earlier, off the beach in front of the house, you could see your own feet and not much else. That is the whole geography of snorkelling on this coast in one morning.

Why the beach is not the answer

Banderas Bay is enormous and it is a working bay — rivers at the far end, boats, surf on a long open shore. The swimming is lovely. The visibility near the sand moves with the swell and the season, and on a lot of days it is simply murky.

So the honest version is this: the clear water here is offshore, and a good snorkelling morning in Punta Mita starts in a boat. No official source names a reef in front of the village, so this story does not either.

The Marietas, which is the answer

The Riviera Nayarit tourism board puts it simply: not far offshore from Punta Mita lie the Marietas Islands, an uninhabited protected national park and World Heritage site. That is the crossing worth making, and it is a short one from the peninsula.

Out there the water clears because there is nothing to cloud it, and the park has been protected since 2005. The board names what lives in these waters — giant manta rays, sea turtles, tropical fish, coral formations — and at the islands that list stops being a brochure and starts being a count.

It is a national park with rules, and they matter: only swimming, snorkelling, diving and the beach are permitted inside it, there is no alcohol in the park, and your boat must hold a CONANP permit. Read that before you book anything.

Where else the board says you can go in

The same page lists the launching points for Banderas Bay snorkelling: Nuevo Vallarta, Flamingos, Bucerías, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Destiladeras and Punta de Mita. From a house on the peninsula, Punta de Mita is the one at the end of your road — the village outside the gate, where the pangas are pulled up on the sand.

The practical consequence: you can be in the water off the islands before the boats from the far side of the bay have finished loading. On this coast, being first is most of it.

If somebody wants to go deeper

Diving is permitted inside the park alongside snorkelling, and the same operators run it. For most groups it is not necessary — the good stuff at the Marietas is in the top four metres and a mask is enough — but if one person in the party is certified and keen, it is an easy thing for the house manager to arrange separately so the rest of you are not sitting in a boat for an extra hour.

Getting out there

The trip we point guests to is a snorkelling safari with a local guide, because it goes from Punta de Mita rather than across the bay and because it is the one trip on this stretch our own readers have booked through us.

If the group would rather have the boat to itself — which with children, or with anybody who is nervous, is worth the difference — the house manager arranges a private charter with a permitted operator. Same rules, your own morning, and you stop when somebody wants to stop.

Go early. The wind gets up around the middle of the morning and turns the surface to chop, and chop is the one thing that ruins this.

When to come

There is no closed season. The water is warm all year and the islands are always there.

Two things move with the calendar. From mid-December to the end of March the humpbacks are inside Banderas Bay, and a snorkelling morning often becomes the whale months on the way out. In summer the sea is warmest and the boats are emptiest, which has its own argument.

Where you stay

Anywhere on the peninsula is twenty minutes from the boats. Casa Mare in Kupuri looks straight out at the islands, which has a way of settling the argument about what to do tomorrow.

Start with our fully staffed houses in Punta Mita and tell Rocío who in the group has never worn a mask — it changes which boat she books.