Swim review: lagoon and waves at Boca del Cielo, Chiapas

Boca del Cielo, the place to enjoy the Pacific in the state of Chiapas! Coming from San Cristóbal this is the closest beach. A bit further on are El Madresal and La Sepultura with spectacular mangroves and ecotourism centres (I haven’t been but I’ve heard), but we hit hostels Eclipse and La Luna a three-hour drive from Sancris. You can also get there by bus.

This place is on a spit of land and hence has two options for swimming: the scary enormous Pacific waves for practicing your courage, and the placid lagoon for a bathwater pootle. Eclipse hostel straddles both. You can have breakfast and a cold beer on the lagoon side, buy local fish delicacies from women in passing canoes, and take a pleasant dip when you want to cool off. On this side it’s very easy for small children and even toddlers to enjoy a swim.  Then on the other side, 200 meters away, are crashing towering waves and adrenalin pleasures. I enjoy that stuff, diving under the waves to pass the break and bobbing on the huge rollers, and especially the post-adrenalin endorphins once you get back to safety.

Scary Pacific waves in the evening

…and in the morning. 

The lagoon side at Eclipse. 

Chilling in and out of the water. 

In between the lagoon and the ocean are the rooms in palapas. We started off in tents on the beach side (it was a long weekend and there were no vacancies for the first night), disturbed by some exceptionally loud fellow guests’ party with pointless screaming into the small hours, but the next night we had a nice room on stilts with a breeze and shower and mosquito net and luckily our inconsiderate neighbours were either gone or exhausted or, dare I hope, hiding in shame so we could sleep.

Fellow tourists enjoying the lagoon. 

Small local girls poling their own boats. 

Eclipse offers any dish you want as long as it’s prawn quesadillas, so we walked a few hundred meters to hostel La Luna for dinner. They do a few more options for food for humans and we ourselves were the main dish for their most numerous visitors, the mosquitoes. We went in February before the rainy season began and the waiter told us that the mosquito clouds were still “nothing, in the rainy season you can just slap yourself anywhere and hit a handful of them”. Hrrrgh. Obviously the mozzies don’t only frequent La Luna but that whole strip of country, and that alone will make me think thrice before going back.

Drinks at La Luna…before the airforce arrives. 

We also checked out the strip of family seafood restaurants towards the end of the spit. That was a real tourism mecca, loads of plastic-chair restaurants serving fried and grilled fish, cocteles, ceviches, seafood of all kinds, raspados, coconuts, beers and so on. Big families camped out at long tables, grandparents holding babies while the more adventurous family members were wading or swimming or taking banana boat rides in the lagoon. The food options were vastly superior to La Luna and it’s not far to walk.

I’ve heard that all this coast got quite damaged in the 8th September earthquake so check out whether it’s up and running before heading there to support the local economy and the local airborne fauna.

Tangerine raspado from the itinerant raspado boat. 

The boats for crossing the lagoon and getting to the hostel from the mainland.