A Walk Through Old Acapulco

Salt Air and Faded Glory: Walking the Zocalo and Beyond

Old Acapulco does not try to impress you, which is exactly why it does. While the hotel zone stretches along the Costera Miguel Aleman in a procession of concrete and neon, the old town - the original Acapulco, clustered around the zocalo and the waterfront - keeps its own counsel. I walked there on a Wednesday morning, when the plaza was half-empty and the cathedral of Nuestra Senora de la Soledad rose against a sky so blue it looked enameled.

The zocalo is a proper Mexican plaza - laurel trees pruned into mushroom shapes, wrought-iron benches occupied by men reading newspapers, a bandstand in the center that looks like it has witnessed a century of courtships. The cathedral, with its unusual Moorish-style blue onion domes, sits on the east side and watches over the square with the patient authority of a building that has survived earthquakes, hurricanes, and the passage of time with equal equanimity.

I walked south toward the malecon, the waterfront promenade that curves along the old bay. The fishing boats were in - pangas painted in blues and greens, pulled up on the sand or bobbing at anchor - and the fishermen were sorting the morning catch on the seawall. The smell was salt and diesel and fresh fish, the honest perfume of a working waterfront. A pelican sat on a piling, digesting something enormous, looking profoundly satisfied with itself.

Breakfast was at El Amigo Miguel on Calle Benito Juarez, a restaurant that has been feeding Acapulco since the 1960s. The ceviche arrived in a wide bowl - fresh sierra fish cured in lime, tossed with tomato, onion, cilantro, and serrano chile - and it was so bright with acid and heat that it reset my entire palate. I ate it with tostadas and a cold Victoria beer, because some mornings demand beer, and this was one of them.

North of the zocalo, the streets narrow and climb. The residential blocks around Calle La Quebrada are steep and tangled, the houses painted in colors that would seem absurd anywhere else but here make perfect sense - coral, turquoise, a yellow the color of mango flesh. Laundry hung from balconies, and from somewhere above came the sound of a radio playing cumbia, the rhythm drifting downhill like water finding its level.

I ended at the Mirador de la Capilla de la Paz, the chapel on the hilltop east of the old town, where the view opens to the entire bay - the curve of the beach, the blue arc of the Pacific, the old town below with its cathedral domes catching the late morning light. Acapulco has been through hard years. The old town carries the evidence honestly. But standing on that hill, watching the bay do what bays do - hold the light, hold the boats, hold the gaze - I understood why people have been coming here for five hundred years. Some beauty does not require renovation.