Pacific Coast - Baja Bound: San Blas – Quintessential Mexico

The Old Customs House

One of Several Stone Roadways

Underground Utilities Being Installed

San Blas perhaps best expresses the heart and soul of the Mexican people and is the quintessential Mexican town made up of historic buildings, stone streets, and modest homes. The regional government of Nayarit recently allocated 135 million pesos for improvements in San Blas including underground wires, renovation of the historic district, and improvements to the port to accommodate small cruise ships. As we walked through town, we found evidence that work has begun; a major street was torn up for the placement of underground utilities and dirt was piled along the storefronts. The mess didn’t keep people from going about their business however as the town was alive with folks shopping by foot, bicycle, and moped. Trucks were busy making deliveries and families arrived in town by car for some last minute holiday shopping. Of course we sought out the Mercado and Panaderia which are always among our favorite stops followed by a visit to the central plaza and church. We also visited the old customs building, which now serves as the town’s cultural center. The first maritime customs house on the Pacific for New Spain was established at San Blas to control shipping of merchandise through the port. San Blas indeed has an interesting history and there is much to see and do, making it a likely candidate for small cruise boats in the near future. Hopefully there will be better charts for navigation which seem to be lacking as we discovered! After 20-hours of motoring from Mazatlan to San Blas, we were faced with several challenges, the first of which was avoiding the many fishing nets hidden below the water strung from numerous pangas. After skirting around the field of panga boats, we discovered that the charts for the entrance into the estuary (Estero El Pozo) to be incomplete or inaccurate. We normally use two sets of charts, one set on our Personal Computer and another set on the boat’s Raymarine electronic system. The chart on our PC lacked detail to be helpful and our Raymarine chart plotter had detail but was offset by nearly two miles, making our GPS worthless. We ended up using visual cues and a paper chart found in one of our guidebooks. Thanks to the reference material in “Pacific Mexico,” a cruising guide written by Shawn Breeding and Heather Bansmer, we were able to sort it all out. We arrived at San Blas in the morning as planned and were glad we did; we surely would not have found the entrance in the dark!