Las Palmas

Las Palmas is a small farming village in the east of the municipality of San Blas, Nayarit, on highway 74, the road that links the port of San Blas with federal Highway 15 and Tepic. It lies on the coastal lowlands about 16 km northeast of San Blas in a straight line, some 23 km and half an hour by road, with Huaristemba about 4 km to the north, La Libertad a little over 3.5 km to the south-southwest and Navarrete about 5 km to the northeast.

The 2020 census counted 180 people in 62 occupied homes, almost unchanged from the 191 of 2010 and 2005; it is the 36th largest locality of the municipality. The village has a kindergarten and two primary schools, Benito Juárez and Ignacio Zaragoza, and its cemetery lies a short way out of town. Seven in ten men over twelve had work in 2020, and more than half the households own a car, which fits a village on a main highway whose people farm the surrounding ejido. Like Huaristemba and La Bajada, Las Palmas received its land in the agrarian reform of the 1930s from the Hacienda de Navarrete, the great estate that dominated the central Nayarit coast.

A rural road runs from Las Palmas to Mecatán, a larger village some 300 meters up in the hills of the municipality. It was long a dirt road that rain could close, and in 2024 the state budgeted the paving of part of it, from kilometer 5 to kilometer 6.1, to improve the link between the two communities. There are no services for tourists in Las Palmas itself; travelers usually pass it on the way down to the mangroves, beaches and seafood of San Blas, or stop in La Libertad and Huaristemba nearby.