Playa Las Estacas

Playa Las Estacas, also listed as Playa Estaca, is a small cove on the first stretch of Puerto Vallarta's south shore, where Highway 200 leaves town and starts to wind along the cliffs. It lies a little south of Playa Conchas Chinas and Playa Lindomar, below the hillside neighbourhood of Conchas Chinas, which locals call the Hills for its villas and gated condominiums stacked above the bay. The next hotels south, Costa Sur and the Hilton Vallarta Riviera, are on the coves toward Punta Negra and Palmares.

The beach is best known as the front of the Hyatt Ziva Puerto Vallarta, an all-inclusive resort that opened in December 2014 on the site of the former Dreams Puerto Vallarta after a renovation and expansion of about 20 million dollars. The resort describes its 335 suites as spread along some 380 meters (1,250 feet) of beachfront in its own enclosed cove, about five minutes from downtown and twenty from the airport, in what hotels market as the Golden Zone.

As everywhere on the Mexican coast, the beach itself stays public even where a resort occupies the land behind it, so you are free to be on the sand and walk the shoreline. In practice, though, the buildings and gated developments take up the ground between the highway and the water, and we could not confirm a marked public access path, so most people on this cove are hotel guests. Independent visitors usually head instead to Conchas Chinas, a short way north, with its rock pools and public access down a cobblestone lane, or to Palmares, a few kilometers south, which has public facilities.