San Blas, Nayarit
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San Blas is both a municipality and municipal seat located on the Pacific coast of Mexico in the state of Nayarit.
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[edit] City
San Blas is a port and a popular tourist destination, located about 100 miles north of Puerto Vallarta, and 40 miles west of the state capital Tepic. The city has a population of 8,707.[1]
San Blas is known as the port where the Spanish priest Junipero Serra, 'Father' of the California Missions, departed from nearby Las Islitas beach on Matanchen Bay in the locally-built barque "Purísima Concepción" to California on March 12, 1768.
The area is also noted for its fine surfing. Playa de Matanchen is famous for being the longest surfable wave in the world as listed in Guiness book.
San Blas was founded in 1531, but the official date of founding is 1768, when Don Manuel Rivera and 116 families arrived on the orders of the Viceroy Marquez de Croix, under the supervision of Don Jose de Gavez, representative of New Spain. At its height the town had 30,000 inhabitants and became headquarters of Spain's General of the Southern Seas.
The old hillside fort was built in 1770 to defend the town's extensive sea trade with the Philippines. Its front has stone carvings of the kings of Spain. On the hill behind the Fort are the ruins of the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, built in 1769. The ruins once contained the bronze bells that are said to have inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, ‘The Bells of San Blas,’. The ruins of a 19th century customs house are on Calle Benito Juárez, three blocks from the main plaza.
During the colonial period, hardwood forests were the raw materials for ships which did a brisk trade with the Philippines and the manila galleon, until the shipping moved to the port at Manzanillo, and later to Acapulco.
San Blas continues to attract bird-watchers. There’s an annual international gathering of bird buffs at the Garza Canela Hotel.
The formerly elegant Playa Hermosa, built in 1951 on a lonely and beautiful stretch of beach about a mile from the plaza. In the 1960s, Hollywood had a brief hideaway flirtation with San Blas when the likes of actor Lee Marvin discovered San Blas for fishing. The Playa Hermosa was the hotel of choice.
The hotel still gets visitors who gasp in dismay at its present condition and wax nostalgic over its grandeur when they were kids in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Now overgrown with vines, it is little more than a photo opportunity on a lonely stretch of beach.
[edit] Municipality
The total municipality had a population of 37,478 in 2005.[2] Islas Marías, site of an infamous prison colony, are part of the municipality.
The area is known among birders for its abundance of migratory birds in the surrounding estuaries and lowland palm forests, attracting significant numbers of bird-watchers. The town is also gateway, along with the nearby village of Matanchen, to the La Tovara park, an extensive mangrove forest and federally-protected nature preserve accessed by small boats. A boat tour can be taken up the estuary, where a freshwater spring provides the local drinking water as well as a natural swimming hole used by both locals and tourists.
The economy is based on agriculture, fishing, and the tourist industry. The main crops are beans, sorghum, tobacco, corn, watermelon, and citrus fruits. There is a substantial cattle herd and the raising of shrimp in the extensive marshlands has become a recent economic windfall despite the environmental damage.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Government tourism page
- The Naval Department of San Blas, Spain's Supply and Shipbuilding Center for Alta California and the Pacific Northwest, 1770-1810
Coordinates: 21°32′0″N 105°17′0″W / 21.533333°N 105.283333°W
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