Cihuatlán

Cihuatlán is the seat of the southernmost municipality on the Jalisco coast, set on the flood plain of the Marabasco River, which forms the border with Colima here. It sits only 13 metres above sea level but inland, about 17 km from Barra de Navidad, and coastal Highway 200 runs straight through town. The 2020 census counted 18,787 people. The municipality also takes in Barra de Navidad, San Patricio Melaque and Jaluco, so Cihuatlán is the working town of the Bahía de Navidad, where people come to shop, sell produce and deal with paperwork. It is hot all year, averaging about 26.5 °C, with rain from June to August.

The name comes from Nahuatl and is translated as "place of women". Conquest-era accounts say the town, which answered to the chiefdom of Cuzalapa, had some 500 women and only 20 men, and in 1528 Hernán Cortés described it to the king as an island of women rich in pearls and gold. Before the Spanish arrived, Cihuatlán paid tribute in cacao, cotton cloth and seashells. Gonzalo de Sandoval reached this coast in 1523, and in 1564 the fleet of Legazpi and Urdaneta sailed for the Philippines from the Navidad shipyard, inside today's municipality.

Today's Cihuatlán is not where the original stood. On 29 September 1865 a huge flood, remembered as "la borrasca", swept across the valley and destroyed the town; when the water went down the river was running through the middle of the plaza. In 1867 the parish priest Rafael N. Murguía chose higher, healthier ground, and the chapel of La Purísima he began there is now the parish church. It has had to be rebuilt several times: earthquakes in 1904 and on 3 July 1932 damaged it, its clock was inaugurated on 2 May 1944, and it was rebuilt again after the earthquake of 9 October 1995. Cihuatlán became a municipality on 12 September 1904. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the valley was planted with cotton, led by Heliodoro Trujillo, whose name the main street carrying the highway still bears.

Farming still runs the place: the valley is given over to crops and cattle, and local cooking means pozole, birria, fish and seafood, with coconut and tamarind sweets and fresh coconut water. Local craftspeople carve fine woods, work coconut fibre and leather, and make clay water jars. Townspeople still tell the story of the US steamer Golden Gate, which caught fire and sank near the mouth of the Marabasco on 21 July 1862 carrying a cargo of gold that, so the legend goes, was never fully recovered.