Hi I've just completed a site about the coast of Micoacán, with maps of the coast, and lots of information that might be useful to anyone planning a trip to the beach.
Thanks very much for posting this. I make some regular trips to the coast and to some favorite spots but I have been only to limited parts of it. I will be referring to your site regularly I am sure.
Now I have to correct my sub-heading on this forum a bit. San Juan de Alima was the northern-most town I could remember at the time I was setting this up. I had forgotten San Telmo and Boca de Apiza.
I hope you come back to post more in this forum and tell us some things about the coast of Michoacán.
Last edited by Peter on Sun 13 Mar 2011, 21:30; edited 1 time in total
I believe it was around October of last year we spent a couple nights at Nexpa. There was a lot of erosion of the beach there and several large structures were badly damaged as the beach was ripped out from under them. Too many years since I have been on a surfboard and now I enjoy it as a spectator. The surf was still good but conditions were not "magic" as I had seen it around February but that was more a product of the weather than the river mouth's sand bar stucture.
It seemed some businesses had changed hands since February. We did rent a two-story rustic cabaña with stove and refrigerator and 3 beds for $200mx per night. It wasn't especially busy there in Nexpa at that time but neither was it deserted.
It's a crappy swimming beach, too gravelly and rough to go in for a swim and looks to be too dangerous for swimming besides. However by the barra at the river mouth there was still a good contingent of surfers on-hand. Beach erosion was so bad many of the existing cabañas will not be able to stay were they are if that trend continues.
The beaches can really move around. In September of 1997 the river rose 3 meters in Maruata and swept half a dozen restaurants into the ocean. Same thing happened in Boca de Apiza last year- they temporarily lost their entire beach. Also Playa Jardin, near Lazaro- there's a concrete house that was dragged out onto the middle of the beach.
A lot of it is just the natural cycles of wind and weather, but there's a serious problem with erosion when you break the ground in this environment. Maruata had a narrow, tree-shaded stream channel and a large, deep lagoon up until about 1980, when erosion from the highway construction project sent millions of tons of efluvium downstream. It ripped a couple of hundred foot-wide scorched-earth channels into the short coastal plain, filled in the lagoon and wiped out most of the palm trees.
The craziest part is that the flat coastal plain between Lazaro and Las Peñas is slated for accellerated development. Who needs common sense when there's a profit to be made? What could possibly go wrong?
Sun 13 Mar 2011, 20:55 by Peter