Huaristemba

Huaristemba is a farming village in the northeast of the municipality of San Blas, Nayarit, out on the coastal lowlands only about 26 meters above sea level. It lies a few kilometers north of state highway 74, the road that links San Blas with federal Highway 15 and Tepic, and is reached by its own paved branch road, the Ramal a Huaristemba; a tiny roadside settlement at the turnoff is registered as El Crucero de Huaristemba. The port of San Blas is about 27 km away by road and Tepic about 45 km.

The 2020 census counted 696 people in 231 occupied homes, fewer than the 788 of 2010 but more than in 2005. Most people are Catholic, and the village has a kindergarten, a primary school named after the poet Salvador Díaz Mirón, a telesecundaria and a telepreparatoria, so children can study here through high school. The land around it is ejido land: in the early twentieth century this whole stretch of the central Nayarit coast belonged to the Hacienda de Navarrete, a tobacco estate that was the most powerful landholding in the area, and in the land reform of the 1930s its fields were handed to new ejidos such as Sauta, Navarrete, Las Palmas, La Bajada and Huaristemba. Today the ejido farmers grow beans and other crops, and they have joined the neighboring communities in asking the state for help leveling their fields.

The name is older than the ejido. A map from 1857 already shows Huaristemba and marks it as the only route from Tepic to the north toward Nogales, before the neighboring village of Sauta took over that role later in the century because its road was quicker. There is nothing set up for tourists here, no hotel and no attraction as such, but the village gives a real picture of the farmland between the mountains and the mangroves, and it is a short detour off the main road down to the beaches, estuaries and boat trips of San Blas. The climate is hot, averaging about 25 °C.