My husband and I are having lunch at Buda Mar, a beachfront hotel/restaurant in Zipolite easily identified by a giant Buddha that sits by the hotel’s beach chairs, gazing serenely at the sea. A naked hippie is sitting in the lotus position by the ocean, facing the Buddha statue and meditating. People walk along the beach, some in bathing suits, some in their birthday suits, along with local venders selling coconuts, beaded jewelry, handmade maracas, roasted peanuts, and chapulines (grasshoppers, a delicacy in this part of Mexico). A middle-aged Mexican woman and her elderly mother occupy a bed under a covered awning. Both are both wearing one piece bathing suits with skirts. The younger woman keeps going into the ocean, frolicking among the naked people while her mother records these adventures on her cell phone. A naked man walks into the restaurant, pulls out a chair and sits down. An amused waiter takes his order. A naked and very pregnant woman walks into the restaurant to place a take-out order.
When my husband and I planned a trip to Zipolite, we had heard that there was a nude beach somewhere in the town, but we didn’t realize that all of the beaches in Zipolite were clothing-optional. Mexican friends who have visited Zipolite told me that, when they were there, they only saw a few nudists. We saw plenty. Not everyone is nude, and it’s certainly not mandatory to take one’s clothes off at Zipolite beaches. I would guess that at least half of the people we saw on the beaches were wearing bathing suits. But plenty of people walk around clothing-free. In California, people often joke that at clothing optional places, the only people not wearing clothes are the people you don’t want to see naked. That’s definitely not the case in Zipolite.
The liberating vibe created by the nude beaches has also created a town that is open and free-thinking in other ways. For one, Zipolite is much gayer than we expected it to be. At dinner on our first night in town, we saw a gay man kissing his boyfriend at the next table. He turned out to be Jop van Bennekom, the Dutch publisher of Butt Magazine and Fantastic Man. He was staying in our hotel, Casa Sol, with a group of gay friends, one of several groups of gay friends in the hotel. I would guess that slightly over half the guests in our hotel were gay men, and it seemed to me that at least a third of the tourists we saw in town were gay. After returning to California, I read an article in Travel and Leisure about the gay scene in Zipolite; it and other articles informed me that many of the most popular hotels, bars, and restaurants in town are gay-owned. Walking along the beach one day, we happened into a drag bar called La Maxima Nue, where we were served delicious margaritas by a gender-fluid wait person (who also went to the restaurant next door and ordered food for us). There’s a gay disco in town called Chizme (“chisme” is Spanish for gossip), and another gay bar that I heard about (but whose name I can’t remember) where patrons can watch the Mexican drag competition series La Mas Draga—not to mention the numerous gay-owned mixed bars where gay and straight people party together. That’s a lot of gay night life for a town with an official population, according to Wikipedia, of 931.
There’s some disagreement in online forums about which beach in Zipolite is the “gay beach.” I would say that all of them are pretty gay, actually, but when we were in town, most people agreed that the gayest beach is Playa del Amor, hidden in a lovely little cove where rocky outcrops frame gorgeous sunsets. A little bar on the beach serves drinks (including delicious orange mezcal margaritas) and provides chairs and umbrellas. People show up in the afternoon and stay to watch the sunset, and then after the sunset, we were told, the entire beach turns into a gay darkroom. The day we went, we didn’t stay long enough to verify what we had heard, but the sunset was as magical as promised.
We came to Zipolite in part because we wanted to visit a place like la Boca del Cielo, a fictional beach town in the 2001 Alfonso Cuarón film Y Tu Mamá También. That beach, presented as an undiscovered, almost mythical paradise, has lived in our imaginations since we saw the movie on the big screen twenty years ago. We knew it was filmed somewhere in the state of Oaxaca (where several Mexican friends have told me that Mexico’s most beautiful beaches can be found), and Wikipedia claims that it was filmed in Zipolite. (Similar claims are made for other Oaxacan beach towns.) Zipolite has a beauty similar to that of la Boca del Cielo, but it’s otherwise nothing like the sparsely populated fishing village in Y Tu Mamá También. Still, it’s a paradise for certain kinds of travelers, who might very well think of it as the mouth of heaven.
Zipolite doesn’t just attract nudists and gay hedonists. It’s also popular with the kinds of people who do yoga and meditate. Massage therapists abound. Local bars serve cannabis-infused mezcal, which I’m told doesn’t actually get you high, though I didn’t try it. It’s a town that attracts all sorts of alternative types—definitely not the crowd you would find in Cancun.
A carnival atmosphere pervades Zipolite at night: street musicians perform, people sell crafts and food in the streets, tourists wander from bar to restaurant—or just wander around soaking up the ambience of the town. As we were walking around town one night, my husband bought a bracelet from a Turkish backpacker couple who were selling their crafts on the street, and then we bought coconut and elote (corn) popsicles from another street vendor. There are many excellent bars, cafes, and restaurants in town, some on the beach, some in the small grid of streets adjacent to the beach. Several people recommended that we try Mao Mau, a Thai restaurant, and as we waited for our table one night, we had drinks across the street at Firefly Cinema, a bar that shows movies on a big screen TV in its courtyard.
Despite all of the services that have sprung up to serve tourists in Zipolite, it remains a place where travelers have to rough it a bit. Cell phone and internet service are spotty at best. One night our hotel lost power and service wasn’t restored for almost 24 hours. That meant that there was also no running water for several hours since the pumps that brought water up to the hotel from a well at the bottom of the hill were not working. Most hotels in town don’t offer air conditioning. (Ours did, but air conditioning doesn’t work without electricity.) There are only two ATMs in the entire town, and they are more often than not out of cash.
These inconveniences may keep Zipolite off the beaten path, though there’s plenty of construction going on in town, and it seems that Zipolite is attracting plenty of visitors, even during a pandemic. (It was a good place to visit during the pandemic since virtually all activities—including dining and drinking—occur outdoors.) The inconveniences certainly won’t keep us from returning to Zipolite. The natural beauty of the place, along with the atmosphere of freedom and good will, will likely lure us back sooner rather than later.
