Nuevo Vallarta (or paying for waking on the beach)

It is a real pity, but as I reach the end of my trip, the beaches are each time worse. As it also are the gossips about the ecosystem. My trip by the coast is almost over and I feel that I haven’t seen enough yet.

Nuevo Vallarta is located in the municipality of Banderas Bay. If we count one by one all the tourist resorts (built and to be built), one could say that it’s halfway between Loreto and Cancun: neither too virgin nor too finished. That’s why it suffers from a deep environmental degradation.

This place is one of the Mexican coast spots that do not have water supply. The reason is that the businessmen negotiate with the National Water Commission, so water cost is calculated not by consumption rate but by supply. I mean, they buy a lot of water -which is sold at a cheap price. This formula is highly convenient because, the other way they would use exactly the same amount, but it would be more expensive. The tourism companies use this water to provide basic services to the hotels and to water golf courses, which requires 35 million liters per day, of which 160 l/s are wastewaters which end up in the Pacific Ocean.

And, as if that weren’t enough, the privileges of the luxury hotels do not end up there. The Four Seasons in Punta Mita, a nearby beach, built an aqueduct to transport the water from Bucerias directly into its facilities.

And, finally, a last rotten thing: the beach is divided between all the hotels, which mean that there are only a few “public” spots to enjoy the sea without having to pay an accommodation fee.  But, to be honest, they don’t let you enjoy the beach as you would like to!

Some congressmen have reported this and other irregularities, which are not only linked to the water problem, but also to the sell of properties located in protected areas. Unfortunately, the fight has more than a year without any progress at all.