Puerto Escondido Vacation Guide

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Puerto Escondido Vacation Guide
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Puerto Escondido offers an extraordinary variety of white sand beaches, surf breaks, hidden coves and fresh water lagoons. When you tire of exploration, shopping and cultural opportunities abound. Favored things to do include horseback riding on the beach, surf fishing, boogie boarding, surfing, eco tours, kayacking, bird watching or just relaxing.

Photography by Bruce Woodworth ©.

Puerto Escondido is still a charming fishing village that is very "Un-Cancun". Visit our Puerto Escondido Hotel Guide.

The Pacific coast of Oaxaca has two seasons, the summer/wet season, and the winter/dry season. With temperatures ranging from 75-95 in the summer and 65-85 in the winter, Puerto enjoys the perfect tropical climate. Sunrise enjoyers will want to bring a sweatshirt for the breezy dawns; otherwise, a wardrobe of swim suits, shorts, and t-shirts will suffice. Most important: bring sun screen and mosquito repellant for all tropical climates.

The Puerto Escondido Airport (airport code: PXM) is about 4km (2 1/2 miles) north of the center of town, near Playa Bacocho. Puerto Escondido is solely served once a day, 5 days a week, by Click Airline (A Mexicana Subsidiary) from Mexico City airport. A minimum of two hours should be allowed for all connections at Mexico City airport - a daunting experience for the first time visitor. Heads Up: Departing gate numbers are not posted on airport monitors until 'maybe' 30 or 45 minutes before the flight is scheduled to leave. Caution: Any flight from Mexico City can depart 20 +/- minutes prior to posted departure time.

The western part of the state of Oaxaca has a history going back more than 2500 years. The Chatino, Zapotec, Mixtec and Aztec cultures all played a significant role in the pre-hispanic history of this regiion. An hour inland, above Puerto, is the ancient Chatino town of Santo Reyes Nopala, the pre-Columbian center of the Chatino kingdom, a site of great archeological and cultural importance. An hour to the north of Puerto is the town of San Pedro Tututepec, the former capital of the Mixtec empire, another site of great significance. Even closer to Puerto, sites along the Rio Verde indeicate very early and important settlements and ceremonial centers. The coast also has some communities with an African heritage, whose ancestors worked on an early slave plantation. In addition there is a long and rich Spanish colonial history. Thus this part of the state has a complex interweaving of indigenous, Spanish and African cultures.

Indigenous people of Zapotec, Mixtec and Chatino descent still live in the hills above Puerto Esondido in villages little changed by modern times. These villages are accessible still by the trails and dirt roads that have been used for hundreds of years for the flow of goods and people among their communities and between their communities and the state capital and the coast.