Bucerías

I came to Bucerías because someone in a Puerto Vallarta restaurant told me the cook was from there. Not casually — they said it as explanation, the way you might say someone trained under a specific chef. The bus north takes forty minutes on the coastal highway and drops you on Avenida de los Pinos, from which point the town makes its personality clear almost immediately: smaller than Vallarta, quieter, and carrying that particular confidence of a place that has been getting better for a decade without broadcasting it.

The Wednesday Market

The street food market on Lázaro Cárdenas runs from around five in the afternoon until the vendors run out, which on a good week is past ten. The range of what you find there embarrasses most restaurants I have eaten at along the Riviera Nayarit. I had aguachile negro from a woman who had been running the same setup for eleven years — she told me this herself when I came back for a second bowl. There was birria de res, slow-cooked since morning, served in small cups with a consommé that was dark and serious. Tlayudas from a family that appeared to have carried the recipe directly from Oaxaca, which I appreciated with perhaps too much regional solidarity given that I live in Puerto Escondido. The market occupies three or four blocks and the crowd runs about sixty percent local, which is the ratio that tells you something is still honest. Arrive early for the best stations; arrive late if you want to sit at a folding table with a beer from the shop on the corner and watch the town move past you.

The Beach and the Art Walk

The beach at Bucerías is what downtown Puerto Vallarta used to promise and stopped delivering sometime around 2015. Wide, dark sand, wave action that is pleasant for swimming without requiring you to fight it, and a malecon that has not yet been designed within an inch of its life. The art walk along Lázaro Cárdenas runs on the same Wednesday evenings as the market — the timing is not accidental — and the galleries range from predictable expat painting to two or three operations worth a serious hour. I spent longer than I expected at a small gallery near the north end showing work by a painter from Tepic whose palette was specifically the color of the Pacific coast at six in the evening. The scale of the town means you can walk the full length of the art walk, double back through the market, and still be at the beach before the last of the light goes.

What to Eat When It Is Not Wednesday

For breakfast, the taquerías on the side streets off the main plaza open early and serve machaca with egg that is made for the hour before the heat arrives. The fish tacos near the beach — there are several, pick the one with the handwritten sign — use catches from the morning rather than the freezer, which you will taste immediately. If you are staying more than two days, the Mercado Municipal is worth a morning circuit less for shopping than for the quality of light that comes through the corrugated roof panels around nine o’clock, and for the jamaica agua fresca that a woman in the back makes stronger than anywhere else I have found in Nayarit.

Getting There

From Puerto Vallarta, local buses run north on the coastal highway every twenty minutes or so from the terminal near Medrano — the fare is around twenty pesos and the ride takes thirty to forty minutes. Taxis from the hotel zone are faster and not dramatically more expensive. From Guadalajara the drive is about four hours; there is no direct long-haul bus to Bucerías itself, so connections through Vallarta are standard.