Mazatlan – Royal Villas Resort and a City Tour

After living in Puerto Vallarta for 2 years, I really expected Mazatlan to be similar based on all the stories I’d heard from frequent Mexican Riviera travelers. Since we arrived at night, I couldn’t really tell much about the city but of course I noticed the impressive boardwalk (malecon) Mazatlan is famous for. In Puerto Vallarta, the boardwalk is filled with entertainers and young vacationers walking from club to club. In Mazatlan, there were mostly roller bladers and couples out for a romantic stroll.

We checked into our resort- which I’ll describe better in my next post. We checked in using our debit card to pay for the room (roughly $240 USD for 2 nights,) only to later discover a mistake was made and we were charged $600 USD at check in, and then $240 for the room when we checked out- a total of $840 USD. We were told the $600 was meant to be a “hold” for an open tab, and that the $600 would be returned to our account in “1 to 3 months.” Obviously, this was pretty shocking. For future Royal Villa Resort guests- don’t use your debit card at this resort!

Mazatlan itself was beautiful. It was much larger than Puerto Vallarta and sprawled out, and it certainly had a different feel to it. Since we only planned to stay in Mazatlan for 3 days, we decided to hire a taxi to give us a tour. It cost us $35 USD and included all the major areas of town, starting with the sunset from a very high peak. We went to the marketplace which was filled with vendors pushing souvenirs. We picked up a few small items before heading to old town. The parks here were absolutely beautiful, surrounded by well-maintained historic buildings, churches, and patio restaurants. We came back here the following day for daylight photos.

The Shrimp Bucket was our choice for breakfast. We dined with birds. No, I’m not joking- there were pigeons and sparrows on and off our table, under our feet, and flying over our heads. It was great.  Oh and the food was fantastic and surprisingly cheap.