Careyes

Costa Careyes is a private community on Jalisco's south coast, in La Huerta municipality, on federal Highway 200 between Manzanillo and Puerto Vallarta. Italian businessman Gian Franco Brignone founded it in 1968 after flying over this stretch of the Costalegre and buying the land. The first houses were Casa Mi Ojo and Rincón de Careyes; villas, casitas, bungalows, a hotel and polo fields followed, all in a house style of its own, the "Careyes style", that his children keep up today. Brignone received Mexico's Aztec Eagle for his part in building tourism on the Jalisco coast.

The name comes from the hawksbill turtle, carey in Spanish, once common on these beaches. In 1983 biologist Alejandro Peña and his university classmates began guarding nests on Playa Teopa; that first season they protected ten, half of them already raided. It grew into the first sea turtle camp on Mexico's Pacific coast, now run by the Careyes Foundation with UNAM's Chamela Biology Station and CONANP. Over four decades it has protected more than 30,000 nests and released over 2.6 million hatchlings of four species: leatherback, olive ridley, loggerhead and hawksbill. Hawksbill nests, unrecorded anywhere on Mexico's Pacific coast in the late 1980s, are back at Careyes.

On a cliff above Teopa stands the Copa del Sol, a sculpture about 11 metres tall unveiled in 2006 and aligned with the Pyramideon, hidden in a cave inland, so that at the equinoxes the sun sets into the cup. The ArteCareyes film and arts festival takes place every spring.