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Nuevo Nayarit · Riviera Nayarit
Most people still call it Nuevo Vallarta. It was renamed in 2023, it sits in the state of Nayarit rather than Jalisco, and it is about twenty-five minutes north of the airport. Flat, green, built around a marina and a golf course, with the widest beach on the bay in front of it. Tom owns a home here.
The neighborhood
Nuevo Nayarit is the flat coastal strip between the Ameca River and Bucerías, and it was built on purpose rather than grown into. That shows. The streets are wide and laid out in blocks, canals and a marina cut through the middle of it, and El Tigre golf course sits at the center with homes backing onto the fairways. There is not a hill anywhere in it, which is the fastest way to tell a photograph of Nuevo from a photograph of Puerto Vallarta.
The beach is the reason most people end up here. It runs for miles, it is wide enough that the resorts behind it never feel close, and you can walk north toward Bucerías for an hour without running out of sand. Nothing in Puerto Vallarta proper looks like it.
The reputation problem is that visitors experience it as a row of all-inclusives and conclude that is all there is. Behind that row are gated residential communities where people live all year, with schools, supermarkets, a hospital and the kind of neighborhood where you know the people on your street.
Living here
Nuevo Nayarit is in Nayarit, not Jalisco. The paperwork goes through a different registry and the property tax office is a different one, which we handle. It changes nothing about how a foreign buyer holds title.
The airport sits about five miles south, which is closer than most of Puerto Vallarta is. The Romantic Zone is forty-five minutes to an hour depending on the time of day.
Vallarta is hills and stairs. Nuevo is level ground, wide sidewalks and a beach you can walk for miles. For buyers thinking about the next twenty years rather than the next five, that matters more than they expect.
Paradise Village marina takes boats of real size, and El Tigre is a championship course inside the development. Many homes here look onto one or the other.
Our stake in it
Tom owns a home here, which is the main thing. The property tax figure further down this page is his own bill, not a number we found somewhere, and when a buyer asks what it is actually like to live in Nuevo rather than visit it, the answer comes from the street he lives on.
On the transaction side, we most recently brought the buyer on Villa Ensueño at El Tigre, a sale of 1,520,000 US dollars. That was not our listing. We represented the person buying it, which is the side of the table we are on more often than people assume.
We do not hold a listing in Nuevo Nayarit at this moment. That changes, and in the meantime we have full MLS access across Banderas Bay, so anything listed here is something we can show you and write an offer on.
Ride through it
We took the bike trails from Tom’s street through Nuevo Nayarit and ended up at a beach club, and we talked about what living here costs along the way. If you want to know whether this is a resort strip or a neighborhood, this answers it faster than we can in writing.
On the ground
Before you buy
No. It is a different municipality in a different state. Puerto Vallarta is in Jalisco and Nuevo Nayarit is in Nayarit, and the state line is the Ameca River just south of it. The airport is about twenty-five minutes away and the Romantic Zone is forty-five minutes to an hour depending on traffic.
Because that was its name until 2023, when the state renamed it Nuevo Nayarit. Both names are still in daily use, listings and maps carry whichever one they were written with, and nobody will be confused if you say either.
Low enough that people assume we have made a mistake. Tom owns a home in Nuevo Nayarit and the predial on it is about 290 US dollars a year. The house he left in Austin was around 15,000 dollars a year. Predial is assessed on a government value rather than market value, which is why the number is what it is.
No beach in Mexico is private. Every beach is federal land and open to anybody, which includes the stretch in front of the resorts. What the hotels own is the service on it, so the loungers and the waiter belong to the hotel while the sand and the water do not.
It is advice written for somewhere else and repeated here out of habit. People live in Nuevo Nayarit year round, walk to dinner and take their children to school. We would not own a home in a place we did not walk around.
Roughly comparable on price. What differs is the renter. Nuevo Nayarit draws families and longer stays rather than the weekend crowd, so occupancy tends to be steadier and turnover lower.
Nuevo Nayarit
Whether you want a place in Nuevo Nayarit, a different part of the bay, or just to understand how buying here works, the first conversation is free and in whichever language you prefer.