https://www.jotdown.es/2025/08/zipolite-sigo-viva/

Zipolite: sigo viva - Jot Down Cultural Magazine Jot Down En la costa del Pacífico mexicano existe un pequeño pueblo con una sola calle principal llamado Zipolite. La única playa nudista oficial de México ...

Leisure and Vice Destinations

Zipolite: I'm still alive

Written by María Sirvent

Zipolite Beach. Photo: Lamblukas (CC)

On Mexico's Pacific coast, seven kilometers from Mazunte and three from Puerto Ángel, there is a small town with a single main street called Zipolite. A quick internet search reveals that it's Mexico's only official nudist beach, a sort of mythical—and mystical—place with a history linked to the hippies of the early 1970s, young people who came from around the world attracted by the beauty of the place and by the solar eclipse of March 7, 1970, which sparked enormous interest at the time and was hailed on television and elsewhere as the eclipse of the century.

I arrived in Zipolite when I was twenty-five, believing myself to be a backpacker and at the height of my stupidity. I wasn't aware of it then, of course, but now, twenty years later and with the benefit of hindsight, I can say I've never again had such blind faith in myself. I had arrived there from San Pedro Pochutla as I've never arrived anywhere since, riding on the back of a vehicle packed with people, all standing, occasionally ducking to avoid tree branches that intruded on the road, and not knowing if I had to pay someone something or if I'd just hitchhiked without realizing it. I remember that, once on the road, I asked different people several times how much the fare was, and no one answered me; they looked at me listlessly, as if they didn't understand me. A strange, dreamlike situation developed, in which I even doubted I was speaking the same language. No one charged me anything for that trip, and by the time we arrived in Zipolite, the feeling of unreality was absolute.

As soon as I got off the trailer, I headed straight for the beach, expecting to find groups of naked tourists scattered on the sand with their Lonely Planets in the sun, but that wasn't the case. There was no one. To my left, nothing; to my right, the Cerro del Amor (Mountain of Love), and in front of me, the raging waves of Playa de los Muertos (Beach of the Dead), a place that some hostel in Puebla had easily sold me as paradise. Now that I think about it, it's very easy to sell paradise to someone who's looking for it.

I sat on the sand for a while, watching the waves, as if doing some errand, and then I looked for a cabin to leave my backpack and spend the night. Since we were in the Mesolithic of cell phones and I hadn't even brought one (I remember thinking before leaving Spain that it was going to be a useless piece of junk), my backpacking routines included finding an internet cafe and sending an email to my parents. The titles of those emails were usually the location where I was and a short medical report. DF: I'm still alive. Puebla: I'm still alive. Oaxaca: I'm still alive. Zipolite: I'm still alive. I liked to tell them about the places I was visiting, and I tried to incorporate the Mexican accent that was taking over me into my writing (like "this is really cool" here, "papaya juice" there). Every now and then I'd drop a New Age gem the size of " this place feels really powerful . " The blame, of course, lay with Alfonso Cuarón , the director of Y Tu Mamá También . We forget it now, but at the time, that Mexican road trip was a huge hit, and I think, all the writers' fantasies aside, it pretty much reflected a certain spirit of the early 2000s, when some of us young people were trying to define the meaning of authenticity by escaping, by going far away.

Back then, messages were circulating that encouraged us to live life to the fullest, and they somehow managed to resonate. They sounded new. We were twenty years old, and life couldn't consist of what it seemed it would consist of: working Monday through Friday until we died in an office in front of a computer. Alfonso Cuarón himself, in his film Y tu mamá también, used a few lines in key scenes, like when Maribel Verdú goes into the sea and the voiceover says , "Life is like foam, that's why you have to go to sea." All of that was very popular in 2000, to put it in context. Now, anyone who says something like that is blocked without much drama, but back then, they were applauded and nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It's worth clarifying that the pristine beach where Maribel Verdú walked away from Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal and finally entered the water wasn't Zipolite Beach, but rather a nearby beach in Bahías de Huatulco called Cacaluta. I had to say this because in 2005, rumors were circulating in backpacker hostels that the beach in Cuarón's film was actually Zipolite Beach, further fueling the legend and the desire to visit that special place.

When Antonio first arrived in Zipolite, the hippies were already there with their makeshift tents scattered along the shore. It was March 6, 1970, the day before the eclipse, and the excitement surrounding the astronomical phenomenon was evident: there were hippies , yes, but there were also amateurs and many scientists who had come from different countries, including Japan. Antonio , now seventy-seven, tells me that he didn't come there as a hippie , but as a librarian.

-Sorry?

"I wasn't a hippie, " he insists. "I was a librarian from Mexico City. I came to Zipolite to die."

He says this without any hint of drama, his voice calm as he leans back in his house, a beautiful cabin perched on a cliff between two beaches. The ocean can be heard in the background. Antonio has long, black hair. We're on a video call. My son, who's having a snack next to me, quietly asks me who that man is and why he's talking like that.

—He's Mexican and lives on a beach, I tell him.

I ask Antonio if he's ever thought about moving somewhere else. In response, he turns his phone camera around and shows me the view from his house. We stay like that for a while, in silence, Antonio, my son, and I, looking out at the Pacific. I'm surprised again by the power of the waves, twenty years later, and I tell my son that when I was younger, I was there, sitting in front of those same waves. He looks at me as if everything I'm telling him is impossible. His mother in Mexico. His mother without him. His mother younger.

"Where would I go, if I'm already living in paradise?" Antonio asks me as he heads back inside his cabin. Then he focuses on a cat walking past him and tells me her name is Tequila.

—Tequila's sister is called Limón.

Two worlds are colliding: my world in Madrid, with its multitasking, rush, and obsession with productivity, and Antonio's world, with his cats, the beach in front of him, and a forest behind him. 

After this initial slight confusion (I had been given his contact information with the indication that "Antonio arrived in Zipolite during the eclipse" and I had prepared some questions for a hippie of almost eighty years old, not a librarian ), Antonio tells his story.

He first came to Zipolite in 1970, invited by the union of workers at Mexico's National Institute of Nuclear Energy, accompanying a multidisciplinary team of scientists who were going to study the eclipse on a 36-hour trip from Mexico City. He repeated this trip several times: 36 hours.

Two years later, in 1972, Antonio returned on his own to spend a few days with his brother and some friends, and it wasn't until 1976, four years later, that he finally settled in Zipolite. Or to die, as he says.

In those years, Mexico was experiencing a climate of fierce political repression, a very dark period that would mark the country's history and culminated in the massacre of October 2, 1968, when the government of Luis Echeverría (the genocidaire who lived to be a hundred, Antonio tells me) ordered a massacre of students during a rally in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in Tlatelolco, Mexico City. The Mexican government wanted to silence its opponents by every means possible, and political dissidents, students, and activists were persecuted, imprisoned, and, in many cases, "disappeared." This climate of fear and anguish drove many people, like Antonio (at the forefront of the country's union movement), into exile. They had to disappear, be erased from the map, seek refuge in more or less remote places.

I ask him what he did when he arrived in Zipolite, and he tells me he went straight to the Camarena Hotel. My son asks me why I'm laughing.

—The Camarena Hotel, I tell him. Bed on the sand.

Antonio tells me that of course he interacted with the hippies , and that of course he was something of a hippie himself . "I can't deny that I come from there. It's the era I lived in." Of course, he smoked marijuana, but "I'd been smoking it since I was fourteen in Mexico City." Upon arriving in Zipolite, he chose to establish ties with the community, with the ranchería, with the locals, who by 1976 numbered about one hundred and fifty people. The hippies and the entire floating population were there, but he preferred to put down roots. "This was a river of drugs," he tells me.

Over the years, he started a family, built his business (Lo Cósmico) and his house overlooking the sea, and became one of Zipolite's most beloved figures. He proudly tells me that there's a forest behind his house. I ask him what he thinks of people like me who live in big cities and work in offices. He replies that he thinks we're "further away from life," that life is more enjoyable near the tropics and the sea. At one point in our conversation, he tells me that he believes the essence of life itself has become a commercial product.

As I listen to Antonio, I can't help but think that all of us, at some point in our lives, have wanted to disappear. I don't know anyone who hasn't wanted to do that. I wouldn't trust anyone who hadn't, either, to be honest. We're made to seek refuge, to leave. It's not always because of a specific threat; we don't have to be pursued by a Mexican genocidaire. All it takes is a routine, a sugary phrase, boredom, sadness, a question that becomes too unbearable. Sometimes, absolutely nothing needs to happen to make us want to simply disappear.

Antonio and I say goodbye. I struggle to hang up. He says goodbye to my youngest son with joy, with an absolutely genuine and contagious smile. I feel like he enjoyed sharing this time with us. He says to him:

—Now I'm going to interview you. How old are you? When are you coming to Mexico?