Playas Caleta y Caletilla

Caleta and Caletilla are two small beaches that run into each other in a cove on the south side of the Península de las Playas, at the far end of the Costera in traditional Acapulco. A short causeway to a rocky islet divides them, and that islet, together with Isla La Roqueta across the channel, shelters them from the Pacific swell, so the water is usually calm and shallow. That has made them the old port's family beaches, especially popular with children and older swimmers, and both are backed by a solid row of thatched seafood restaurants. They are also a working harbour for the pangas that cross to La Roqueta, so the water is not the cleanest, and on holidays the sand fills to bursting.

Once the two were simply called Caleta, the diminutive of cala, a place where boats can land easily. In June 1813, during the War of Independence, Hermenegildo Galeana watched from this shore as 80 insurgent soldiers were ferried across to attack the royalist garrison on La Roqueta. In the early 1900s the beaches could only be reached from town by a rough path or by boat around the peninsula; the road that finally linked them was paid for in 1928 with money collected for a presidential visit that never happened, and in 1949 the route from Playa Tlacopanocha to Caleta became the first stretch of the Avenida Costera Miguel Alemán, at first called Avenida Caleta. The Acapulco singer-songwriter José Agustín Ramírez wrote a song named after the beach.

The islet between the beaches holds the old Mágico Mundo Marino aquarium and pool complex, in a building that was the 1940s home of politician Maximino Ávila Camacho until it was expropriated in 1949, later used as a school and opened as a balneario in 1990; Lonely Planet now describes the aquarium as defunct. Behind Caletilla are a crafts market and the Caletilla bullring, opened in 1955. From the pier, water taxis and glass-bottomed boats leave for La Roqueta, passing the sunken Virgen de los Mares, and on 12 December the boats sail out to her in procession with music and flowers.