La Quebrada

La Quebrada is a rocky gorge on the west side of old Acapulco, a short way uphill from the Zócalo, where the cliff drops about 45 m into a narrow sea channel some 7 m wide and only about 4 m deep. The cut is partly man-made. In 1799 the Spanish Crown's physician Francisco Javier de Balmis proposed opening a gap through the hill, the Abra de San Nicolás, to let the sea breeze cool a town troubled by heat and disease; work stopped for lack of money, was taken up again in 1876 by Colonel José María Lopetegui, whose soldiers removed thousands of cubic metres of rock, and stalled once more. The unfinished ravine kept the name La Quebrada.

In 1934 local young men started diving off the cliff for fun, and the dives soon became Acapulco's most famous show. A diver first climbs the bare rock face, stops at a small shrine near the top, then waits on a ledge about 35 m above the sea, reading the swell, tide and wind, and launches so that he enters the water just as a wave fills the channel; the fall lasts about three seconds. The evening shows are lit, and in the last one divers jump holding torches. The cliff also hosts a high-diving world championship named after Raúl García, "El Chupetas", one of its best-known divers. In April 2025 Guinness certified the divers' 35 m head-first plunge as the world's highest, and the same show marked the five-millionth dive made here.

Visitors watch from a set of terraces and steps on the facing cliff, reached from Avenida Adolfo López Mateos, where the divers' association sells tickets; a free spot nearer the road gives a more distant view, the La Perla restaurant also looks straight onto the dives, and the Hotel El Mirador, whose first 12 rooms were built on these cliffs in 1933, stands above. Pelicans dive for fish below. After Hurricane Otis in October 2023, debris made the water unsafe, and the divers restarted their shows about 45 days later, in December 2023. It is customary to tip the divers.