4 within 3½ hours · 1 under 2 hours
Mazatlán's closest Pueblo Mágico is El Rosario, an hour south: a former mining town with a gilded baroque altarpiece and the home of singer Lola Beltrán. For a weekend, go into the foothills of the Sierra Madre to San Ignacio, a riverside village of red tiles, and Cosalá, a seventeenth-century silver town with cobbled streets and a mine museum. Down the coast in Nayarit is Mexcaltitán, the island village in a lagoon that some call the cradle of the Aztecs.
Best months for the area: Jan, Feb, Mar, Dec (when most of these towns are dry with comfortable afternoons)
Day trips (under 2 hours) 1
Close enough to drive there and back from Mazatlán in a day. Closest first.
Weekend escapes (2 to 3½ hours) 3
Worth a night or two. Closest first.
On the map
Getting there
Mazatlán has its own airport, Mazatlán (MZT), so you can fly in and rent a car there.
A car is the easiest way to reach most of these towns; the bigger ones also have direct buses from Mazatlán. Each pueblo's page has its own getting-there notes.
Drive times are from OpenStreetMap routing without traffic. Times marked ~ are estimated from the distance and may run longer on mountain roads.