Maruata

Maruata is a village of about 1,100 people (2020) on the coast of the municipality of Aquila, and it is often called the most beautiful beach in Michoacán. It belongs to the Nahua indigenous community of Pómaro, which, like its neighbours Coire and Ostula, still holds its land communally and has so far turned down outside proposals for large tourist developments. The coast highway only reached Maruata in 1980 and electricity in 1996, so the village has grown slowly into a small, locally run ecotourism centre. Fishing and farming are still the main livelihoods, and older people speak both Nahuatl and Spanish. The name is said to come from an old word, Maruatio, 'place of precious things'.

The landscape is sea and stone. The sand is split into three beaches by big pale rock formations, and in front of them stand seven rocky islets that take the full force of the swell, throwing spray up to 10 m high and leaving the water near shore noticeably calmer; some of the rocks have been bored through by the waves. The best known is the Dedo de Dios, a pointed sea stack like a finger raised to the sky, which you reach by walking around a headland or crawling through a narrow tunnel in it. Behind the main beach a lagoon forms where the Escobillero and Chipana streams meet the sea, with the mouth of the Motín del Oro river beyond, and herons, pelicans, cormorants and ibis fish there.

Maruata is also one of the most important nesting beaches on the Pacific for the black turtle, a dark form of the green turtle, as well as for olive ridleys and the odd leatherback. Its fishermen stopped catching turtles in 1975, and since 1982 the community has worked with the Universidad Michoacana to protect the nests; around 2,500 black turtle females were estimated to nest here, and the beach has been a Ramsar wetland of international importance since 2008. Most visitors camp: families rent space under palapas along the sand, with meals and bathrooms, and there are rustic cabins and a community-built ecotourism centre on a hill with views over the bays. Simple palapa kitchens cook fish, shrimp and lobster to order.