Bahía La Choya

La Choya, Cholla Bay to Americans, is the village at the north-west tip of Puerto Peñasco, where the shore hooks round to enclose a bay. Past the last Sandy Beach towers come caliche streets, beach houses and boats parked in driveways. About 130 people live here year-round, but in holiday seasons the population tops 5,000, nearly all of them Americans.

Fishermen came in the 1930s or 1940s. The land, some 3,374 acres that also took in today's Sandy Beach, was titled to Duncan Brown in 1941, and in 1956 his widow sold it to Gustavo Brown Sr. The port in town was then more estuary than harbour and boats could not be launched there, so Arizona anglers began leasing lots at Cholla to keep their boats. Cabins followed, then outright purchase of the lots, and once electricity finally arrived in the mid-1990s, bigger houses went up. Today there are over 1,250 lots.

The tide is what shapes the place. The gap between high and low water is huge, and on the lowest tides the whole bay drains, leaving waterfront homes facing a plain of sand and mud where sand dollars, baby octopus and squid turn up. At high water the bay is calm enough for swimming and windsurfing. Next door, the La Choya estuary is protected for its marine life and migrating birds, and above the houses rises La Loma, the white-rock Cerro de La Choya, about 100 m high. On the west side, a path between houses leads to Tucson Beach, a rocky shore where sea lions often haul out.

Residents run their own clubs: Vecinos de la Cholla owns the clubhouse and holds a yearly Christmas party for the children of local Mexican families, and the Cholla Bay Sportsmen's Club provides marine rescue for the upper gulf. There are a few restaurants, two small markets, a motel, a tackle shop and JJ's Cantina beside the boat launch.