Riviera Nayarit Stretches Out amid West Coast Boom

The northern border of the Riviera Nayarit, Mexico’s booming Pacific beach destination, has been officially extended to include the entire coast of the state of Nayarit, but don’t expect its long stretches of shore to be developed anytime soon.

Much of the northern area of Nayarit is made up of vast areas of mangroves and wetlands that are unsuitable for building, said Richard Zarkin, spokesman for the Riviera Nayarit Convention and Visitors Bureau.

The Riviera Nayarit resort region was officially launched by the state’s government in the spring of 2007. It started with 112 miles of coastline from the southernmost point at the resort area of Nuevo Vallarta just north of Puerto Vallarta Airport (roughly, the boundary of the states of Nayarit and Jalisco, the state where Puerto Vallarta is located) and stretched north to the colonial town of San Blas.

This fall, Nayarit Gov. Ney Gonzalez announced that the boundary of the tourism destination would extend north another 80 miles, from San Blas to the border with the state of Sinaloa, so that it covers the entire coastline of Nayarit state.

Several more properties are under construction and scheduled to open this year, including Dreams Punta Mita Resort & Spa, a 320-room property with a Greg Norman 18-hole golf course; a 437-room Secrets Punta de Mita; a 456-room Iberostar hotel in Litibu; and a 162-room Marival Condo Resort in Nuevo Vallarta.

In addition, investors have put about $118 million in tourism developments in Punta Raza, an undeveloped area north of Punta Mita. Plans call for eight hotels, 950 houses, a golf course and a marina.

The first phase, including a Park Hyatt and Grand Hyatt properties, are scheduled to open in Punta Raza in 2011. Riviera Nayarit has benefited from a $1.5 billion investment in the region’s tourism facilities and infrastructure since 2005 from the Mexican government.

The major project in that investment is construction of a four-lane highway between Tepic in the northernmost part of Nayarit and the Riviera Nayarit that will help connect major population centers to the resort area. The first section to be built is between Tepic and San Blas and is expected to shorten the driving time between the two towns to about 20 minutes.

Riviera Nayarit has a total of 13,000 hotel rooms. It reported the highest hotel occupancy rates in Mexico for the months of January, February, March and July 2008, with occupancy topping 79 percent.