Nuevo Vallarta is an interesting study of both geography and marketing.

The Ameca River flows into Banderas Bay just north of Puerto Vallarta's international airport and serves the most part the state border separating Jalisco, where Puerto Vallarta is, from its northern neighbour Nayarit, where Nuevo Vallarta is.

Driving north into Nayarit on Federal Hwy 200 takes you across an expansive fertile valley the river flows through sourced from the mountains on the surrounding horizons.  The valley stretches over to Bucerias where the highway then crosses a short mountain range to Sayulita and continues up the coast.

Between the Ameca River and Bucerias is a long wide stretch of uninterrupted beach and where you first find Nuevo Vallarta and its neighbouring community of Flamingos.

Today, about half the arrivals at PVR, the international airport, go north into Nayarit.  To Nuevo Vallarta, Bucerias, Sayulita and the many other beachside towns and resort areas the Riviera Nayarit region offers.

Today, as I’m writing this, there are 1,460 active listings in our MLS of which 835 are in Jalisco and 625 are in Nayarit.  As Riviera Nayarit tourism continues to draw more travellers, the percentage of sales and listings in Nayarit is expected to rise.

Nuevo Vallarta is a planned community that got its start in the 1980s.  The growth of tourism in Puerto Vallarta naturally spilled over to areas and towns north and with federal funding and private investment Nuevo Vallarta was created along the wide unspoiled beaches between the airport and halfway to Bucerias.

Unlike Puerto Vallarta, Nuevo Vallarta is well manicured and planned, offering a variety of living choices.  Houses and condos are available on its El Tigre golf course.  There is a 244 slip marina along with a protected water channel offering homes private boat slips.  Among the golf course, the marina and the beach are houses, condos, a mall and resorts introducing travellers to this side of Vallarta.

This is where the marketing comes in.  Riviera Nayarit is a tourism marketing name, a catchy one at that, of a tourist area that starts in Nuevo Vallarta and follows the Nayarit coastline north. And the tourism board cleverly appropriated the shortened “Vallarta” name as being generic to either Puerto Vallarta or Nuevo Vallarta.

While Puerto Vallarta is a city of 250,000, Nuevo Vallarta is actually a village of 420 people living in 132 homes and is only one of over a dozen communities scattered around the valley area between the Ameca River and Bucerias.