Behind the scenes at Mexico’s secret nudist town

The origins of the town’s name are disputed, but most locals will tell you Zipolite means ‘Beach of Death’ in the indigenous Zapotec language. There’s good reason for the ominous nickname.

Cesar, who runs dolphin- and whale-watching charters off the coast, tells me that every year he witnesses people drowning. “The currents and waves here are sometimes so strong that people panic and never re-emerge from water,” he says.

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In fact, Zipolite is considered one of the 10 deadliest beaches in the world. Despite this grim statistic, tourism has been steadily growing over the last three decades, as the town evolves into an offbeat vacation spot. Guest houses, cafés, hotels and restaurants of every kind have mushroomed.

Local people like Roberto, who manages a small hotel facing the sea, have seen Zipolite change radically during their lifetime. When he was a child, he was scared to walk around at night, as the town consisted mostly of big cacti, birds, iguanas and turtles. It was a wild place.

“It used to be a desert, with a virgin beach and just five cabanas,” he says. “In the 1970s, people started to come and chill at the beach, playing music and swimming naked. They were hippies. Police were telling them to dress up, but then they’d just get naked again. Local people were disturbed in the beginning, but soon they understood that even nudism could be a business.”

“No-one watches TV, no-one talks about the news, no-one talks about Covid every two minutes. That’s such a relief.”

- Marylene, Zipolite visitor

I’m chatting to Roberto in the dying light outside his posada, near the beach. He’s telling me about the cultural shift of Zipolite—how outsiders came, discovered the nudity and the low-key vibe, then settled down and never left.

“You see me sitting here, but in fact I’m working!” he laughs. “Clients come every day looking for a room, especially during the nudist festival. That’s when people are just walking naked everywhere. Some locals find it shocking, but others are making good money off it, so they don’t care.”

You can look at this cultural shift in two ways, I suppose. It’s either a small Mexican town gradually losing its identity to foreign investment, or a plucky story of coastal capitalism. For the locals’ part, they’re just happy to see money flowing into Zipolite again.

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“When I was a child, we were asking ourselves what we could do in this small village with no opportunities,” Roberto says. “Now even a federal government deputy has come here to invest. His new resort is called Naked. Places like this are now profiting enormously from gay tourism, which brings in much more revenue than penniless backpackers.”

LGBTQ+ tourism has grown a lot over the last decade, particularly in bohemian, free-love towns like Zipolite.

“There’s a lot of machismo in Mexico,” Guillermo tells me, “but in Mexico City and along the Oaxacan coast, the culture has been changing a lot in recent years. In Zipolite, people are free to basically do anything they want. This beach has become one of the safest places in Mexico for gay people.”

“We came here because there is no Covid!” Roberto told me on the beach. In fact, the virus was already everywhere. People just didn’t want to think about it.

The combination of sun, pristine Pacific beach, rampant nudism, LGBTQ+-friendliness and a packed events calendar makes Zipolite an attractive destination for diverse travelers. Marylene, a 49-year-old first aid teacher from Quebec, has traveled here every winter for the last 10 years to “disconnect from any kind of pressure.”

“Here I can do a lot of sport. I can swim naked and take my time for reading,” she tells me, while sitting on her hotel terrace. “No-one watches TV, no-one talks about the news, no-one talks about Covid every two minutes. That’s such a relief.”

Zipolite has become hugely popular with Canadians, like Marylene, mostly thanks to the balmy Pacific climate, and the fact that they can get direct flights to Huatulco, an hour’s drive inland.

“Having a sea view instead of a computer screen is the way to go! But this is still Mexico,” Marylene continues. “Last year, a man was murdered for selling drugs, right here in the main tourist street. In 2010, a man entered a bar, told everyone to leave, shot the bartender through the head, then left in his own car. Still, I’ve never heard of any gringo (foreigner) getting into trouble,” she adds.

Zipolite is still a sleepy town, by Mexican tourism standards. Most travelers don’t expect to run into problems here, despite the widespread knowledge that drug cartels control the coast of Oaxaca. Backpackers traveling through Mexico usually find out about Zipolite through other travelers, via word of mouth, often in nearby beach towns like Mazunte or Puerto Escondido. This is what happened to Skjalg (31) and MacKenzie (28).

“We’re just gathering some sun vitamins before heading back to cold Norway, where we’re currently based, waiting to become full-time nomads,” MacKenzie, a US-born citizen, tells me. She met her boyfriend Skjalg in Nepal some years ago, while volunteering for the NGO, Conscious Impact. “We feel lucky to be able to enjoy life in a period when many people are stressed out because of the pandemic.”

Skjalg and MacKenzie are just passing through, but other travelers get stuck for years after reaching Zipolite.

The town has a weird magnetic pull that’s hard to shake off. Marco, from Bergamo, Italy, fell in love with the beach 10 years ago. Since then, he’s only returned home once, to see his family and friends. “I got really scared when I went back home, some years ago. My friends are working at crazy rhythms. I looked around and felt that no-one was happy,” he tells me.

Marco makes a living selling jewelery and other trinkets to passing tourists in the main street of the town. “In Italy, I would have the same job,” he says. “The only difference is that I would be much more stressed, especially with all the restrictions that people are facing right now. In Mexico, they don’t even require a test to enter the airport!”

The general feeling in Zipolite is that COVID-19 doesn’t exist, figuratively speaking. Many people seem to be coming here to escape the pressures and restrictions of everyday life, and almost no-one wears a mask (or anything else, to be frank).

It’s just a feeling, however. At the beach, I started talking with a couple who preferred not to speak with me, saying they’d recently tested positive. At my hotel, the staff suddenly began wearing masks and handing out sanitizer to all the guests. A few days later, in February, all the local events were sadly canceled, including the nudist festival, which attracts hundreds of tourists every year.

“We came here because there is no Covid!’ Roberto told me on the beach. In fact, the virus was already everywhere. People just didn’t want to think about it. They wanted to keep partying, swimming, and enjoying the craziest beach in Mexico. After all, no-one wants trouble in paradise.