San Marcos

San Marcos is the seat of the municipality of the same name on Guerrero's Costa Chica, about 59 km southeast of Acapulco and some 18 km inland from the sea. Federal Highway 200, the Acapulco to Pinotepa Nacional road, runs straight through the centre, which makes the town a natural stop on the coast road towards Oaxaca. The 2020 census counted 13,650 people.

The town is named after Saint Mark the Evangelist, whose image was brought in the 16th century by an Augustinian friar, Jerónimo Jiménez de Santisteban, who founded the parish of Xocutla. Before taking its present name the place was known as La Estancia, then Estancia de Xocutla and later Hacienda de San Marcos; José María Morelos spent a night at the hacienda in March 1813. The municipality was created by decree in September 1885.

San Marcos is a pottery town. Its potters make tinajas, or cántaros, the big clay jars used to keep drinking water cool, along with cooking pots and comal griddles, and one neighbourhood is called El Cántaro after the trade. It is chilena country too: the song "La Sanmarqueña", written in 1922 by the priest Emilio Vázquez Jiménez, plays in Luis Buñuel's film Subida al cielo. Local dishes include aporreadillo (eggs scrambled with dried beef and hot salsa), frito, a red mole with pork offal, festive goat barbacoa and chilate, a cold drink of cacao, rice, cinnamon and raw cane sugar.

The big event is the Feria Regional de San Marcos, peaking on 25 April with processions, dances and jaripeo bull-riding. In the centre stand the parish church of San Marcos Evangelista with its garden and a monument to Cuauhtémoc. Towards the sea, within the municipality, are El Dorado, an open-ocean beach, and the Laguna de Tecomate, a lagoon about 22 km long fringed with mangroves.

On 2 January 2026 a magnitude 6.5 earthquake centred about 15 km southwest of town brought down around 50 houses in the municipality, killed a woman and left many buildings cracked, followed by thousands of aftershocks over the following weeks.