All five of Mexico’s ecosystems can be accessed in what I call the 500-kilometer-wide Magic Circle around Guadalajara.
Driving only a few hours, you can immerse yourself in cool, shady forests, desert scrubland, or flat, highland prairies, and if you go far enough west in the Magic Circle, you’ll come to Mexico’s tropical ecosystems.
According to Richard Rhoda and Tony Burton’s excellent geography book, “Geo-Mexico,” you’ll find both Tropical Evergreen Forests and Tropical Thorn Forests along the Pacific Coast. In the states of Nayarit and Jalisco, these tropical forests are likely to take the form of swamps and mangrove thickets.
One of the best places to discover the wonders of mangroves is San Blas, Nayarit, now just a three-hour drive from the west end of Guadalajara, thanks to improved highways.
Exploring the mangroves
Some head for San Blas because it is reputed to have “the world’s longest surfable waves,” but for me, the big attraction is an early-morning panga ride through the mangroves of the Estuary of San Cristobal. So tall are the mangroves and so thick is the vegetation that parts of these channels have become tunnels, interconnected in an extensive labyrinth that only the boaters can navigate.
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