Back in the '70s going to Mexico was synonymous with visiting Acapulco. Nowadays, it seems no one goes there. Cancun, Mazatlan, Los Cabos, Puerto Vallarta sure, but Acapulco?
So what happened? Did the place go down the drain? Did it get dated? What happened?
A long, long time ago, Acapulco was a truly beautiful place; a beach surrounded by elegant cliffs and the blue sea. Then, the people came and they built tall hotels to hide the cliffs and they flushed their toilets to turn the sea brown.
Now, mind you, I haven’t been there in 15 years but back then the only thing it had going for it was the nightclubs. It was a really sad place, really. You could tell it once had been beautiful but all that was left was some sort of pathetic touristic wasteland.
| passed through a few years back and it was still a busy spot. Kinda seedy in places, but no more than a lot of other beach resorts. It seemed that there were way more Mexicans holidaying there (in “kiss me quick” hats and silly t-shirts) than foreign* visitors - it was like the Mexican equivalent of Blackpool.
I’ll second what Aro said. Having just visited Acapulco this past summer as the last point in a road trip from Cancun to there, I can attest taht it’s still a fairly busy place. Mostly Mexicans visiting from what I could tell. Sure there were a smattering of Americans, Europeans, and Asians there, but mostly it seems to have become the place for “locals” to go. Sort of like Daytona or something in the US. While I’ll admit that the view coming around the mountains, and seeing the bay spread out below you with all the ships at anchor, and the hotel’s lining the cliffs was spectacular, the actual beach is pretty nasty. The sand is very corse, and littered with trash, the water is ok, but not really that attractive. Compaired to Cancun…well, there really isn’t a compairison. Cancun is much much nicer in my opinion. The water is absolutly beautiful, sand is nice and clean (some stray seaweed), and most important to me, the sand in Cancun never gets hot. Because it’s actually made up of tiny fossils or something, it never get’s that “burn the hell out of your feet” hot that most other beaches do. And I also found on the whole Cancun to be cheaper.
Acapulco is not on the list of places I’d return to. Nice to visit once, but not going back.
That’s funny because the first time I went to Puerto Escondido, maybe twenty years ago, there weren’t all that many foreign tourists. Acapulco, on the other hand, was so overrun with Americans that it felt like you were in a completely different country.
I think it might have to do with the fact that foreign tourists left Acapulco for nicer resorts, leaving a vacuum to be filled by the locals. Also, there was a new highway built between Acapulco and Mexico City; the old road was notoriously dangerous. It’s a lot easier now to just drive over there for the weekend.