Chacala

This Chacala is a small farming village in the hills of Cabo Corrientes, Jalisco, about 7 kilometers south of Yelapa and some 600 meters above sea level. It should not be confused with the better-known Chacala, the beach village on the Riviera Nayarit coast of Compostela: this one has no beach of its own and sits inland, in the forested sierra that rises behind the southern shore of Banderas Bay.

The 2020 census counted 348 people, a little more than in 2010 (305) and a little fewer than in 2000 (376). It is an older community: about one resident in four is over 65. Chacala is an ejido, a village whose lands are held in common under Mexico's agrarian law; in 2023 one of its ejidatarios took a complaint about two hectares of family land to the state's agrarian ombudsman, a sign of the pressure that rentals and outside buyers put on land in this corner of the municipality. The municipal encyclopedia singles out the natural forests of the central part of Cabo Corrientes, from Chacala to south of El Tuito, as one of the things worth visiting in the municipality.

Chacala lies on the dirt road that crosses the mountains from El Tuito, the municipal seat on Highway 200, to Yelapa, the only land route to that otherwise boat-reached bay village. The track winds through the hills with several creek crossings and a lookout high above Yelapa and Banderas Bay; drivers who have done it plan on an hour and a half to two hours from El Tuito to Yelapa. There are no hotels or visitor services documented in the village, so it is a place to pass through on a back-country drive rather than a destination in itself.