Punta Mita vs Punta de Mita: two places, one name

Two places at the north tip of the bay that share a name and almost nothing else. One is gated, beautiful and expensive. The other is a working town. Knowing which one you are looking at is the first question, not the last.

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Two places, one name

Punta Mita vs Punta de Mita is the first thing to settle, because almost everyone gets it wrong and the listings do not help.

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Punta Mita, without the "de," is the gated master-planned community out on the headland. Security gates, golf, the large hotels, and residential enclaves inside the walls. Most of the luxury villas advertised online for this part of the coast are inside this zone.

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Punta de Mita, with the "de," is the town. Local restaurants, surf breaks, fishing pangas working off the beach, and public beaches anyone can use. It takes in Corral del Risco and El Anclote, and it is where the boats out to the Marietas Islands leave from.

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They sit beside each other on the same peninsula. Locals, listing sites and search engines all use the two names interchangeably, partly because the resort took its name from the point. So a property advertised under one name may well be on the other side of the gate, and the price, the feel and the daily reality are not comparable.

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Establish which one you are looking at before you get attached to anything.

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Inside the gates

Punta Mita sits at the end of the road, with water on three sides, and everything about it follows from being at the end of something rather than on the way to anywhere.

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It is where the high-end hotels are. It is also where a great deal of the bay's most expensive residential property is, much of it private homes run with staff rather than condos with a front desk.

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Privacy is the organising principle. That is not a marketing line, it is how the place is built: walls, gates, discretion, and neighbours you may not meet. For some people that is exactly the point and the reason they are willing to pay for it.

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Doug and Charlotte have stayed out here in hotels and in a condo above the beach, and they describe it as a place they love for a week or a weekend. They have also been clear about the other half of that sentence, which is below.

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The beach

A surf beach. You will see surfers most days, and the waves are part of the character rather than an occasional thing.

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It is walkable and beautiful, and the water is bluer out here than it is in Nuevo Vallarta. Swimming is a different question from walking, and it depends on the day. If you have been picturing the flat calm water of Nuevo Vallarta, this is not that, and anyone choosing between the two should know it before they book anything.

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The beach clubs, and the question to ask

This is the practical thing on this page, so it gets its own section.

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The beach clubs are the good part of the day for most people who stay. Doug and Charlotte have been to all of them. The staff, the loungers, the food and the drinks are as good as anything on the bay, and a morning that starts at one of them is the reason people come back.

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Access is not automatic. Which club or clubs you can use depends on what you have bought or rented, and it is written into the arrangement rather than assumed. So when you are looking at a place out here, whether to buy or to rent for a season, ask which beach clubs come with it, on what terms, and whether that stays true if the property changes hands.

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It is an ordinary question locally. Nobody will be surprised you asked. But it is not in the listing, and it makes a large difference to what living here actually feels like.

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How the week fills up

Golf is the main event, and the courses are a significant reason people choose this end of the bay. There is pickleball, and there are sports clubs.

If your picture of six months involves playing something most mornings and being somewhere beautiful the rest of the day, this end of the bay does that better than anywhere.

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Eating out

Inside the gates there are not many restaurants, and that is the honest version.

A lot of the good eating happens in the hotels and the clubs. What a town like Bucerías has, which is somewhere different every night within walking distance, the resort side does not have and is not trying to have.

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There is more in the town, and it is close. But it is a trip out rather than a step out the door, and that distinction is most of what separates living here from living in Bucerías.

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Houses with staff

Worth a paragraph, because it is unfamiliar to most Canadians and Americans and it is normal here.

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A large share of the private homes at this end of the bay are run with household staff. It is a standard arrangement rather than a luxury announcement, and it comes with a set of responsibilities most buyers have not thought about: how people are hired, what is owed to them, and what happens when you are away for six months of the year.

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Those are questions for the in-house lawyer before you buy, not after.

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The town

Punta de Mita is the other half of the answer, and it is a different proposition in almost every way.

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It is a working town. Fishing pangas go out from the beach, the restaurants are local rather than hotel, and the beaches are public, which after Nuevo Vallarta and the gated side of this peninsula is worth saying out loud. Corral del Risco and El Anclote are the parts most people mean when they say they were in the town.

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It is also where the boats to the Marietas Islands leave from, which is the one thing out here that draws people who are not staying on the peninsula at all. If the islands are part of why this end of the bay appeals to you, the town is the practical address for it.

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The surf is the other constant. The breaks here are the reason a certain kind of person chooses this town over anywhere else on the bay, and they are busy with people who came for exactly that.

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A note on what this page can tell you. The lived detail above, the beach clubs, the staff, the quiet, is the gated side, because that is where Doug and Charlotte have stayed. They have not lived in the town, so what you have here is what it is rather than what six months in it feels like. If the town is the side that interests you, ask Doug, and ask people who live there.

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Getting around

You need a car, or a car service, and you need it more than anywhere else covered on this site.

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The peninsula is at the end of the road. The nearest towns of any size are La Cruz and Bucerías, and everything else on the bay is further still.

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The airport is the longest run of any area on this site. It is past La Cruz, where the high season number is already an hour and a half to two hours, and the same road carries everyone. Two hours is the safe figure to budget, adjusted for the month. Before you commit to several years of doing it, ask people who live out here what they allow, because they will know the week you are asking about better than any number written down here.

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Noise and pace

Inside the gates, quiet, and deliberately so. This is the quietest address on the site and the one where you are least likely to hear anyone else.

The town keeps its own hours, as a town does.

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In February, and in September

February. Full, and at its best. The hotels are running, the clubs are busy, the golf is booked and the whole peninsula is doing what it was built to do.

September. The other end of the range. The seasonal population leaves, the peninsula is a long way from anywhere that stays busy, and the places that depend on winter visitors run accordingly.

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Why it matters. Of everywhere on this site, this is the widest swing. Nuevo Vallarta empties and still has a supermarket and a highway ten minutes away. Out here the emptying and the distance land on top of each other, and the quiet that is restful in February is a different thing in September. The town holds up better than the resort side does, for the same reason La Cruz holds up better than a gated community: there is work going on in it.

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Worth knowing

The name is older than the resort by a long way, and it was not always this one.

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In sixteenth and seventeenth century records the point appears as Punta de Tintoque, after a pre-Hispanic town that stood out here and had gone by about 1690. "Punta de Mita" shows up later, on a 1797 map of the bay drawn for the Viceroy of New Spain, and it has been the name since.

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Which means the gates are recent and the address is not. Whatever you end up thinking of this end of the bay, people have been arriving at it and writing it down for a very long time. (Attributed to Eduardo Gómez Encarnación, municipal chronicler of Bahía de Banderas.)

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If this sounds like you

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The gated side suits people who want privacy above convenience, who play golf, who like the water rough rather than flat, and who either have staff or do not mind cooking at home most nights. It suits people who are not in a hurry to get anywhere.

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The town suits a different person: someone who surfs, or who wants a working town with public beaches and local restaurants and does not need a gate.

Doug and Charlotte's own verdict is worth having, because they know the resort side well and do not choose it. They love it for a week or a weekend. For six months it is too isolated, and isolation is the sort of thing you feel in the second month rather than the first.

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What they have considered is buying out here as a rental property they use for a week a year, which is a different proposition altogether and probably the right way to think about this end of the bay. Some places on this coast are for living in. Some are for owning and visiting. They are not the same decision and it is worth knowing which one you are making.