The coast is clear

FONATUR's loss is nature's gain. A victim of political squabbling, poor planning (unlike in Cancún, there's a bewildering dearth of dining and nightlife), and a lack of state infrastructure (yes, that eight-hour drive from Oaxaca City), Huatulco is now considered the resort that never quite was. Only four of the bays are to be fully built up, with two-thirds of the area left untouched as a "protected zone."

For the most part, I found Huatulco's scale overwhelming. The multi-laned approach to town resembles an airport circuit road; the actual town center, La Crucecita, is three miles from the bayside resorts; and the three developed bays could have been styled anyplace in the world where they sell Sol. Yet there are glittering moments amid the generic dross. The Quinta Real and its spectacular cupola-topped restaurant with full-length windows towers above the cliffs. Sharing Tangolunda Bay was my hotel, the Camino Real Zaashila, whose beachside pool, at a length of 500 feet, had to be the longest I've ever seen.

I sought out Playa Conejos, which I'd heard was Huatulco's one guaranteed spot for fresh-caught local fish — and which is the next (and last) of Huatulco's bays to be developed. Getting there required a ten-minute drive that brought me to an unmarked clearing in a forest right off the highway. I parked the rental car and hiked along a narrow trail that eventually opened onto a beach. Apart from a frolicking couple at the water's edge and a lone palapa shack, the one-mile crescent of golden sand was blissfully unsullied.

The shack turned out to be the fish restaurant: not the sort of place that had menus, or waiters, or bathrooms. A matronly woman emerged and asked if I wanted the catch of the day (sierra fish) served pequeño or grande. It turned out that she, her family, and a small cooperative had run the place — a shack on the sand with no name — for 20 years. I took a seat under the palapa; chomped through the sierra, muy grande and fried whole (outstanding); and asked my host how she felt about making way for the bulldozers.

"¿Qué vas a hacer?" she replied. Her answer was rhetorical: "What are you going to do?"

CondeNast Traveler Puerto Escondido's Guadua bar.

Huatulco's vacationland is the Oaxaca that FONATUR wants you to see — rather than the rough-and-ready dreamscape of "Y Tu MamÁ También," which was shot along Huatulco's undeveloped beaches. To really experience the small-town magic of Oaxaca's coast, you must head to the belly of the beast, tracing what is nearly the southernmost point of Mexico. There, on the road from Huatulco to Puerto, you'll hit a pearl necklace of villages that includes Puerto Ángel and Zipolite. The former is, from a distance, an exquisite half-moon bay that on closer inspection is ratty and polluted; the latter is a nudist beach where drownings in the riptide are as common as the hard drugs sold there. But then you get to Mazunte, a pretty beach hamlet removed from the madding crowd — and what's more, it's the quiet, delicate epicenter of a marine miracle.

Mexico is home to six of the world's seven sea-turtle species — four of which gravitate to Oaxaca's shores to lay their eggs, and one of which, the olive ridley, now comes in record numbers (150,000 female visits were tracked over three days recently). Until poaching was outlawed in 1990, however, almost the entire community here depended on turtle hunting, with up to 1,000 a day slaughtered (for the utility of their skin and not, as is often mistakenly thought, for the green shell that inspired their name).

Today, Mazunte's former abattoir has been reborn as the Centro Mexicano de la Tortuga, the nation's chief turtle research center and museum. A hundred yards away, the same families who once eked out a living poaching turtles now run a natural-cosmetics cooperative (started in 1999 with a little help from the Body Shop). The two operations turn a tidy and laudable profit in ecotourism, but they're also the area's major letdowns: The museum is in desperate need of imagination, while the cooperative sells creams and oils that are neither of great quality nor, for the most part, locally sourced.

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