Puerto Vallarta is not just a quaint little coastal town, nor is Riviera Nayarit just the best-kept secret on the Mexican Pacific coast. The beauty of the coast, its exotic vegetation and especially its clean beaches take your breath away. The idea of keeping our beaches clean has become our mission. We are the only region that has been able to get 5 beaches certified by the Mexican Institute of Regulations and Verification (Instituto Mexicano de Normatización y Verificación – IMNV)!
After months of intensive efforts, the northern and southern Nuevo Vallarta beaches and part of the Bucerias beach in the Riviera Nayarit region, and the Garza Blanca and Camarones beaches in the Puerto Vallarta region, have earned this award. This means much more than just keeping garbage off the sand, the Institute checks water quality as well, ensuring that it’s free of any contaminants to make it safe for swimming, playing and even scuba diving nearby.
Earning this prize was no mean feat. Joint efforts had to be carried out to comply with very high standards and strict guidelines to obtain the level of cleanliness required. What to the common eye may look like a pristine beach could be a disaster to the expert eye. They look at water quality, the amount of foreign particulates on the sand, respect shown for animal and plant diversity, the absence of floating or visible solid residue in the ocean, the surrounding infrastructure, ease of access for handicapped people, environmental protection programs, public security and an infinite number of factors that are taken into account to ensure that the beach is not only free from garbage or contamination, but also safe in all aspects. For example, Erick is a recurring visitor. Last April, during Holy Week, he was visiting Nuevo Vallarta. While smoking a cigarette, he was asked if he thought the sand he was standing on was clean. He answered: “yes”, but Erick didn’t know that the beach he was on was undergoing certification.
Since then, he has learned that among many other requirements, the sand cannot contain more than five solid particle residues of any size on an extension of 100 linear meters of beach. Erick had become conscious of an important fact. Doing a quick calculation, in the last two minutes, his own family had thrown out a cigarette butt and a small wrapper. Those were two particles already! They may have been small, but they were there. He started understanding that if his wife smoked a pack a day, at least a third of her cigarette butts ended up on the beach, so just that activity had stopped that beach from getting certified. He changed his outlook one hundred percent. Nowadays, if he’s asked the same question, he’d say: “define clean; to know if it’s clean or not, I need to understand your concept of clean”. Four months later, the certification had been obtained thanks to the joint efforts of private enterprise and state and county governments. When Erick came back last November, he no longer smoked on the beach.
“It’s incredible. The beach had looked clean before, but now it looks like it’s gone through a Laundromat. The view is astounding. It used to be impressive, now it’s mind-blowing. Now I can be sure my kids won’t get sick by swimming in the sea”, he said.
Still, the Banderas Bay community can’t let down their guard. They’re maintaining very strict programs to ensure that their certifications are kept up and are working on four more beaches. They know you can’t isolate one beach from the others, so they’re working to keep up the standards so that every point on the coast is impeccable.
