Mexico’s Coastalegre region offers a stunning blend of natural beauty and cultural richness. High-end hotels beckon travelers, but a majority of the Pacific region remains wild and untouched. This pristine coastline, with its diverse ecosystems and vibrant marine life, is a haven for nature lovers and adventure seekers
More than 200 miles of dense jungle, mango orchards, and golden beaches make Mexico’s Costalegre (“Happy Coast”) feel much farther away than just a couple of hours south of buzzy Puerto Vallarta. In this remote section of Jalisco along the Pacific Coast, a small group of private landowners protect unspoiled shores and surrounding mountain forests from the kind of tourist development that pervades other coastal communities.
“Costalegre is Mexico’s crown jewel, not only because of its natural beauty and varied ecosystems, but because it’s being developed in a very mindful way,” says Ricardo Santa Cruz, the co-founder and CEO of Xala, a new eco-conscious planned community along Costalegre’s northern shores. Santa Cruz has spent 17 years carefully developing the 3,000-acre beach destination with an organic farm and agave plantation amid nature reserves and wildlife sanctuaries. Like other major landowners in this area, he hopes to inspire travelers while diligently preserving a part of Mexico’s spectacular – and still wild – landscape.
In 2008, Santa Cruz and his partners started reforestation efforts at Xala, and nine years later, they received Ramsar wetland designation for two estuaries that support more than 100 bird species. Abutting the estuaries, 300 acres of mango trees supply fresh fruit to Xala and its surrounding communities. Still to come: a 51-room Six Senses hotel, slated to open in 2026, along with affordable employee housing that’s currently under construction.
The coastal Xala community will open an ultra-luxe hotel in 2026.
Xala
“When you’re developing a large tract of land in a remote location containing [fragile] ecosystems and neighbored by marginalized communities, you have to consider the environmental, social, and economic impact on all stakeholders,” Santa Cruz says.
A Fledgling Sanctuary
Just a few miles south of Xala on Highway 200, another community, Careyes, marks the metaphorical beginning of modern Costalegre. When Italian banker Gian Franco Brignone arrived at this stretch of the Pacific Coast in 1968 looking for untouched wilderness, he began creating a blueprint. Back in the Mediterranean, Brignone had witnessed tourist enclaves take over with little regard for the local ecology, so he kept conservation at the forefront of his plans in Jalisco for an arts and nature destination backed by a community foundation.
In four decades of operation, Careyes has only developed two percent of its 7,000 acres – for Mediterranean-style lodging, local restaurants, and arts programming, including annual music festivals. Most of the community remains wild.
Travelers visiting Careyes might watch migrating humpback whales and participate in sunset releases of sea-turtle hatchlings. Biologist Alejandro Peña de Niz opened the community’s own turtle sanctuary in 1983, before the Mexican government’s official ban on turtle-egg harvesting. More than 40 years later, and largely because of Careyes’ protection measures and public education, four of the world’s six sea-turtle species – three of which are on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s critically endangered list – return to the Costalegre to lay up to 5,000 eggs daily during the high-summer mating season. Now similar sea-turtle camps dot Jalisco’s shores, protecting turtles from poachers and natural predators such as coatis and jaguars.
Sea turtle sanctuaries are spread across the Costalegre’s protected shores.
Costalegre Tourism Board
The Goldsmith Effect
In 1987, Brignone sold some 20,000 acres of land to James Goldsmith, a French-British financier who was similarly interested in preserving the Costalegre. Through the Cuixmala Ecological Foundation, which Goldsmith founded in 1988, he established a private land stewardship; today, the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve spans 32,000 acres of dry tropical forest that’s home to 70 species of mammals, 270 bird species, and more than 1,200 plant varieties. It’s one of the most diverse forests along the Americas’ Pacific Coast.
Just 20 miles from Careyes, the 18-room Las Alamandas resort serves as a small, public-facing portion of the Goldsmith family legacy. Here, Isabel Goldsmith-Patiño, one of Goldsmith’s daughters, oversees the solar-powered adobe guest rooms, an organic farm and orchards, a private landing strip, and a driftwood-furniture workshop that together make up just two percent of the 1,982-acre forest and beachfront property. Isabel’s grandfather, Bolivian businessman and diplomat Antenor Patiño, had once hoped to build a marina and a golf course on the land, but when she inherited it in 1982, the younger Goldsmith abandoned those plans and let nature take over.
“When I arrived and saw this unspoiled beach, I wanted to save this little piece of the world, protect the area with organic farming, and encourage travelers to disconnect from their everyday [routines] and reconnect with nature,” Goldsmith-Patiño says.
Four Seasons Resort Tamarindo, where a small farm and pollinator garden complement the natural ambience.
Four Seasons Resort Tamarindo
Teaching Future Generations
Mornings hiking in the jungle and afternoons spent on secluded beaches draw travelers farther down the Costalegre, where more than 2,000 acres of protected eco-reserve surround the Four Seasons Resort Tamarindo. Here, 157 serene suites carved into ocean cliffs share the land with a 35-acre farm growing nopal cactus, avocados, peppers, and more produce for the resort’s three restaurants. At a new on-site pollinator garden, butterflies and bees busy themselves among the dahlias and arnica.
Four Seasons’ nature-based programming extends to the surrounding communities. A new project, Sal a Pajarear (“Go Birding”) has introduced 2,200 local schoolchildren to native bird species such as the glossy ibis and northern jacana. Tamarindo resident biologist Francisco Javier León González says that this and more ecological offerings, from guided ethnobotany walks to tactile exhibits in the hotel’s Discovery Center, teach foundational lessons in sustainable resource use and the conservation of vulnerable ecosystems. “These programs with the [surrounding] towns allow us to talk about conservation and instill a love of animals and nature,” he explains. All along the coast, initiatives such as these entice travelers while cultivating a love for the land where it matters most – at the local level.
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Reference: [https://www.virtuoso.com/travel/articles/meet-the-people-preserving-paradise-on-mexicos-costalegre]