Cerro de la Contaduría

The Cerro de la Contaduría, also called Cerro de San Basilio, is the hill that rises at the eastern entrance of San Blas, on the Nayarit coast about 64 km west of Tepic. It was the heart of the colonial port. In 1768 the royal inspector José de Gálvez chose San Blas as the base for Spain's expeditions to Sinaloa, Sonora and the Californias and set up a shipyard there; from 1774 navy ships carried mail between San Blas and Manila, and later in the century the port supplied the Spanish voyages to the Pacific Northwest. The hilltop gave a clear view of the harbor entrance, so the Spanish fortified it.

The fort, usually dated to around 1760 and known as the Fuerte de San Basilio or simply La Contaduría, also housed the accounting office where goods were counted and recorded before they were shipped. What is left are thick stone walls with small openings that looked out over the sea, a row of old cannons along the parapet and a small site museum. The hill had its moment in the War of Independence: in late 1810 the priest José María Mercado took Tepic and then San Blas, whose port commander surrendered without a fight on 1 December, and sent dozens of the port's cannons to Hidalgo in Guadalajara. Weeks later royalists turned the town against him; cornered on the hill, he fell to his death down the slope on 31 January 1811. A monument to Mercado stands among the cannons, and another honors the Batallón de San Blas, which fought in the 1847 war with the United States. Both the fort and the church below are in INAH's catalog of historic monuments of Nayarit.

A short walk down the slope is the Templo de Nuestra Señora del Rosario, finished in 1769 and known as La Marinera because its Virgin of the Rosary is the patroness of sailors. Lightning set it on fire in 1787, and today it is a shell of stone arches and walls with no roof, no windows and an unfinished facade. Its bells are said to have inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Bells of San Blas", the last he wrote, days before he died in 1882. The ruins are a favorite backdrop for wedding and quinceañera photos, and every 7 October the Virgin's feast brings masses and processions. From the top you look over the town, the river mouth, the mangroves and the Pacific; many visitors come up for the sunset.