Zona Dorada

The Zona Dorada, the Golden Zone, is Mazatlán's main hotel district, a strip of beachfront hotels, restaurants, bars and shops north of the old city. It starts where the malecón's longest section, Avenida del Mar, ends at a point, and continues north along Avenida Camarón Sábalo, the zone's main street, with the beaches of Gaviotas and Sábalo on its ocean side. Offshore sit the three islands of Mazatlán Bay, Pájaros, Venados and Lobos, which frame the view from almost every hotel balcony.

The district is the product of the tourism boom of the late 20th century. Mazatlán's first resort life was in Olas Altas, near the old center, where hotels flourished from the 1940s to the 1960s with Hollywood names like John Wayne and Gary Cooper coming to fish; in the 1970s new hotels for foreign visitors went up on the beaches to the north instead, in what became the Zona Dorada, and the old town's hotels declined. The Hotel Playa Mazatlán expanded in that period, and in 1975 Grupo Vidanta was born here with the opening of the Paraíso Mazatlán. North of the zone, at the new marina, the beach continues as Playa Cerritos toward the newer development of Nuevo Mazatlán.

Today the Golden Zone is where most visitors stay and where the city goes out at night. Camarón Sábalo is lined with some of the port's most upscale hotels, restaurants, bars, casinos and entertainment spots, and in the evening it fills with off-road buggies, quad bikes and cars playing music. Playa Gaviotas, inside the hotel zone, is one of Mazatlán's calmer beaches, with banana-boat, jet-ski, kayak and catamaran rides and banda musicians walking the sand; Playa Sábalo, about 2 km long, sometimes has waves big enough to surf. From the beach between the El Cid Castilla and the Posada Freeman, boats leave for Isla de Venados.