Puerto Peñasco

For centuries this stretch of desert coast had no permanent town, because there was no fresh water. Fishermen from Guaymas, Bahía Kino and other ports camped here in season, chasing the totoaba, a large fish prized not for its meat but for use in medicine, and anglers from Arizona came as early as the 19th century. In 1826 Robert William Hale Hardy, a retired British naval officer searching for pearls and precious metals, named the headland Rocky Point, the name that appeared on sea charts until President Lázaro Cárdenas changed it to Puerto Punta Peñasco. The rock in question is solidified lava from ancient eruptions that reached the sea.

Under Cárdenas in the 1930s a railway was built to link Baja California with the rest of Mexico, passing through the port. A police post was set up in 1932, the town was laid out in the 1940s, and shrimp fishing became the mainstay of the economy. Puerto Peñasco became a municipality of its own in 1952.

The push to make the town a major resort began in 1993, when government and private investors began building condominiums and facilities, inspired by Cancún and prompted by falling catches caused by overfishing and pollution. The town was included in the border free zone so that foreigners could drive in without a visa, and the federal government paid for roads and other infrastructure. Economic growth reached twelve per cent between 2002 and 2007 before the US downturn hit the property market. A cruise ship terminal begun in 2014 has been halted for financial reasons.

Puerto Peñasco lives between two countries. It is known in English as Rocky Point and as "Arizona's Beach", since Phoenix, Tucson and Yuma are closer than Mexicali or Hermosillo, and it has been called the most American city in Mexico. Many residents are retirees from the United States and Canada, some living in trailers and RVs, and English is heard in shops, restaurants and the town's English-language newspapers.

The port's Mexican identity rests on the sea. The fishing festival begins every year on Navy Day, 1 June, with mariachis, folk dancing and the crowning of a festival queen, and fishing tournaments are part of the calendar. Shell jewellery, ironwork and carved ironwood are the local crafts; the ironwood carvings are a tradition of the Seri people of the Sonoran coast.

Spring break gives the town another face. High school and college students from Arizona and California come for the beaches and for the legal drinking age of 18, and Avenida Matamoros near Playa Mirador was long famous as the party street. Science has a place too: the University of Sonora's desert studies and research centres grew from a 1963 desalination project with the University of Arizona, and an experimental unit founded in 1973–74 to research shrimp raising has led the development of shrimp farming techniques in Mexico.

The 2020 census counted about 63,000 people in the city, the eighth-largest locality in Sonora, and the population has doubled since 2000 because of tourism.

Tourism and fishing are the main sources of work. The town has more than a hundred restaurants, dozens of hotels and motels and many RV parks, and beachfront condominium developments have spread along Sandy Beach, Las Conchas and Cholla Bay since the 1990s. The fishing fleet still works from the port, and shrimp remains the prized catch. Two general hospitals and several smaller colleges, including a technological institute and a technological university, serve the town.

Much of the visitor trade comes by road from Arizona and California, and the town is at its busiest at spring break. The city spreads from the Old Port at Whale Hill along the coast in both directions, with flat streets of houses, shops and condominiums on the volcanic rock and sand of the desert shore.

Seafood is the heart of the local table. Shrimp from the northern gulf is the town's pride, sold fresh at the fish market on the malecón during the season from September to March and served in the Old Port's seafood restaurants. Fish tacos, ceviche and aguachile, raw shrimp cured in lime and chilli with cucumber and red onion, are found all along the coast.

Inland flavours are Sonoran and built on beef: carne seca and machaca, dried shredded beef, often scrambled with eggs at breakfast, burritos and carne con chile colorado. Coyotas are large, flat cookies traditionally filled with brown sugar, and bacanora, an agave spirit made in the Sonoran town of the same name, is the local drink alongside Mexican beer.

Restaurants range from seafood places on the malecón with sunset views over the Sea of Cortez to American-style bars and cafés serving the town's many North American residents, and Cholla Bay has a long-established cantina popular with expatriates.