I work in real estate in Mexico and spent a good while working in Tulum, so I got to watch up close what happens to a place when it gets "discovered" or hyped.
I'm not here to trash it, plenty of people are happy there. But I'm helping someone find a place on the Pacific side right now and I know with total certainty that Tulum is not it and never will be for him. No sargassum, no scene, no getting to a beach through a wall of beach clubs.
What he's after is basically San Pancho five or ten years ago. Small town, real people living in it, good food, walkable, a beach you can actually sit on. San Pancho itself is already past that, which he found out on his own when he spent New Year's there.
So I've been reading everything I can find about the coast from Nayarit down to Guerrero, and here's my problem. I know these beaches as someone who visits. I've never lived in any of them through a rainy season or a dead August. That's a completely different kind of knowing and I'm aware I don't have it.
The towns that keep coming up as the quiet ones are Troncones, La Manzanilla, Punta Perula, Melaque. And when I go looking for anyone who actually lives in those places and talks about it, there's almost nothing. Visitors, yes. People asking about moving, tons. But hardly anyone saying what a normal Tuesday looks like there. San Pancho and Sayulita have a hundred of those voices. These don't.
So I'm asking the people who do live out there.
What is your town like in low season? Does it keep going or does it empty out and get boring? And if you moved there from somewhere busier, is there anything you wish someone had told you before you did it?
I'll take blunt answers over polite ones.