Ixtapa

Ixtapa is the second-largest town in the municipality of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, a working city in the flat farming valley behind the bay, about 11.5 kilometers from downtown Vallarta and some 26 meters above sea level. It has nothing to do with the beach resort of Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo in Guerrero, which shares the name. The 2020 census counted 39,083 people here, after growth of about 2.6 percent a year over the previous decade, making it a fast-growing commuter town for the Vallarta area. State Highway 544, the road that climbs to Mascota and the Sierra Occidental, passes through it.

People have lived here for a very long time: archaeological finds near Ixtapa are part of the evidence that this valley belonged to the cultures that dominated what are now Jalisco, Nayarit and Michoacán between about 900 and 1200 AD. In the modern era Ixtapa was a hacienda. Before Vallarta turned to tourism, the Montgomery Fruit Company set up on the Hacienda de Ixtapa to grow bananas for export to the United States, and brought with it the region's first tractors, prefabricated houses, an electric generator and even a railway. The boom gave work to many and filled the port's shops, and older people in Vallarta still remember those years as the "bonanza de Ixtapa".

Today Ixtapa is where many Vallarta families live, shop and study rather than a place for sightseeing. It is home to the Centro Universitario de la Costa (CUCosta), the University of Guadalajara's coastal campus on Avenida Universidad, whose Peter Gray Art Museum gathered a collection of modern Mexican art begun with a donation from the philanthropist Peter Gray in 2002, though it is now reported closed. It is also a gateway: the road into the mountains toward Mascota, Talpa de Allende and San Sebastián del Oeste starts here.