San Juanico

Here are the photos of San Juanico I took on my 2014 Baja road trip.

Here is surfing beach. There are public (free I believe) palapas — umbrella-shaped shade structures, and campers just pull up and camp right there on the beach. East of the surfing area, there are many fishermen with their boats & trucks. The beach itself looks like it has lots of green seaweed in the surf, but there is a nice sandy spit just west of the surfer beach that's free of seaweed — an easy walk, and a great spot to watch the surfing action from the side. If you look carefully, you can see my campervan in the last photo in the group below.

I didn't see too much commercialization. It's all super low key. There was one taco stand on the beach, and a few Mexican mini-marts in town for groceries.

San Juanico seems to be divided into two zones: one zone is downtown by the beach, and the other is a collection of gringo beach houses on the bluff west of town, by a place called Punta Pequeña.

Here is the original Mexican town:

And, here is the gringo rental house zone. Also, campers just seem to pick out random spots and park their campers in this area. The only place I saw "no camping" signs was in front of rental houses farther west from town.

I'm sure there's much better info on the web, but here are some snapshots of random rental houses I happened to drive by closest to the beach:

Because I like privacy, I ended up camping on the secluded beach a few miles south of San Juanico.

Getting to San Juanico

I think "Loreto" is the closest major (jet plane) airport at 170 miles away. Alaska flies to Loreto twice a week. It's now a paved road all the way — just finished in the last few years!

If you ask Google Maps how to get from Loreto to San Juanico, it sends you on a more "direct" route — but that's an unpaved dirt track through the mountains — ignore that! The real route is Hwy 1 south to Ciudad Insurgentes, and then Hwy 53 back north again towards La Purisma where there is a turnoff for San Juanico. Google Maps hasn't been updated to show this new paved turnoff, which is a road that bypasses La Purisma — don't drive all the way to La Purisma. In general the pavement is easy driving, but still — this is Mexico, so you have to be alert for a few rough spots on the road.