This report is for Mazunte-Zipolite Mexico Cost of Living and Livability Factors.
My subscribers ask me to review smaller towns from time to time. So, today I am reporting on a few small beach communities stretching along the southern Pacific coast of Mexico in the State of Oaxaca. This stretch of beach communities includes Mazunte and Zipolite.
I will show you pictures and videos we took as I describe this area.
I am grouping Mazunte and Zipolite into the same report even though they are separate towns about 16 minutes apart by car, as shown in this clickable Google Map.
Zipolite
In a general sense, Zipolite seems to be a naked hippie hideaway from the 1960s and 1970s. There aren’t that many places that have maintained naked public beaches since the 60s, but Zipolite has. Not everyone is naked, but enough people are naked that you are unlikely to be alone. So you won’t feel self-conscious in your birthday suit.
You will see nudity on the beach more in the mornings and evenings when the sun is not as likely to burn off your private parts.
Zipolite is smaller and a little more intimate than Mazunte and the average age seems to be in the 60s+. That makes sense since the hippie movement was started by people in their teens and twenties back in the 1960s. But every generation since has had its share of hippies so there are younger people in Zipolite also.
Mazunte
The average age you see walking around Mazunte is younger than Zipolite. In Mazunte, you are more likely to hear house and trance music, whereas in Zipolite you will hear an eclectic mix of music spread over the decades including 60s hippie music, classical, new age, and house music.
Mazunte feels larger, more spread out, and more crowded than Zipolite. There are definitely more people, accommodations choices, and restaurants in Mazunte. Whereas in Zipolite, you could just park your car once and walk everywhere.
Qiang and I decided that if we were to live in this area of Mexico, we would live in Zipolite and just visit Mazunte from time to time.
In this report, we will talk about the cost of living, restaurants, things to do, accommodations, and the livability factors for this area. But I write reports on the best areas around the world to retire cheap in paradise. So visit VagabondBuddha.com to see my catalog of my reports.
Mazunte-Zipolite Cost of Living
Here is an Airbnb Apartment for about $655 USD per month before taxes and fees at the time of this post. 
As you can see, you are not going to get a cheap price by booking online. I recommend that you book for a few days or a week and then talk to the owner when you get there in person about a better price without fees on a cash extension.
Of course, you should also be able to beat this price if you live like a local, with the locals, in and around the locals. When you arrive, just walk around and look for rent signs. Based upon what we saw on the ground there you should be able to find a 1 bedroom apartment for about $400 a month. Maybe less if you lease for 6 or 12 months.
We were only there for a few days so we stayed in this beach-front dive hotel for $20 USD per night. It was super rugged but we had a beachfront balcony on the 3rd floor, so we had front row seats to the nude parade. There were also hostels in the area starting at around $15 USD per night which seemed overpriced for one person. We had a private room beachfront for 2 people at $20 USD night.
The high-end restaurants in Zipolite and Mazunte average around 120 pesos ($6 USD) for an entree, a local family-owned restaurant starts around 80 Pesos ($4 USD), and you will see food cart type vendors starting for about 60 Pesos ($3.00 USD) in the street corners around central market.
With regard to local transportation, collectivos are about 30 Pesos ($1.50 USD) from Mazunte to Zipolite but trips within Zipolite or Mazunte are walkable. A taxi from Mazunte to Zipolite is about 80 Pesos $4 USD. Thus, a bare-bones cost of living estimate that includes only rent, 2 meals a day, and local transportation is shown in the below table.
Estimated Cost of Living Table (Mazunte-Zipolite)
|
Expense |
Cost |
Low |
Medium |
High |
| 1 Br. Apartment (month) |
$13.33 |
0 |
14 |
30 |
| Hotel (Casa Dan) |
$20.00 |
0 |
12 |
0 |
| Hostel/per day |
$15.00 |
30 |
3 |
0 |
| High-End Restaurant |
$6.00 |
1 |
4 |
8 |
| Neighborhood Restaurant |
$4.00 |
30 |
44 |
48 |
| Food Cart |
$3.00 |
30 |
12 |
4 |
| Subway (none) |
$0.00 |
20 |
26 |
8 |
| Bus (Collectivo) |
$1.50 |
20 |
10 |
0 |
| Taxi (No Grab or Uber) |
$4.00 |
6 |
10 |
20 |
|
Total |
Per Month |
$720.00 |
$777.62 |
$731.90 |
|
Total |
Per Day |
$24.00 |
$25.92 |
$24.40 |
Here is a free report explaining, “How The Cost of Living Table Works.”
The above table is an estimated cost of living is for one month, for one person, as a temporary visitor. It only includes rent, 2 meals per day, and local transportation. For a full understanding of what it would cost you to live here, visit Numbeo for Puerto Escondido (there is not enough data for Mazunte-Zipolite yet) and add anything you spend money on in your home country that is not mentioned in the table.
Never move anywhere until you have visited first personally to verify the living costs for your lifestyle and needs. I am not guaranteeing these prices. These are just my notes and estimates from the time of my visit and this post. Your costs will likely be drastically different depending on lifestyle and the time since this post.
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Best Area to Stay in Mazunte-Zipolite
People come to Mazunte-Zipolite for the beach. So you will want to spend at least some time at the beach. I show you all of the Best Beaches in my beach tour, but my favorites are Playa del Armor and Playa Rinconcito.
But stay near here in Zipolite or the second map below if you stay in Mazunte.
Mazunte below:
Cheapest Flights to Mazunte-Zipolite
There is no large airport in Mazunte or Zipolite so you need to fly into Puerto Escondido or Huatulco. Both are about an hour away by taxi. We almost always get our cheapest flights on this Skyscanner. They have a web crawler that is constantly looking for the cheapest prices all over the world. As usual we found the cheapest flight to Puerto Escondido on Skyscanner.
Mazunte-Zipolite Livability Factors
Here are some of the factors I think about when I consider each place for retirement potential (or long term living). I call these my livability factors. I rank each one high, medium, or low. If the factors are ranked mainly high it is a good indication that I could live somewhere.
After I assign a value to each factor, I assign an overall score to a place.
Walkability: Medium. If you lived in Zipolite or Mazunte, and stayed within either, you could walk everywhere, walkability is high. But if you lived in either and frequently moved between them, then walkability would be low. But the collectivos are frequent and cheap between them, so I will say medium.
Internet: Low. The Internet is an issue in the coastal areas of Oaxaca including both Mazunte and Zipolite.
Food: Medium. If you judge Mazunte and Zipolite based upon other towns this size in Mexico, I would say high. There is a decent diversity of foods in the restaurants spread across this area, so I will say medium. But if you are a foodie, and you can’t cook, this is low.
Weather: High. The average temperatures year-round don’t fluctuate all that much. The cold season is Jan-Dec when nighttime lows average 72F/22C and daytime highs average 83F/29C. The warm season is May-Aug when nighttime lows average 77F/25C and daytime highs average 86F/30C. The rainy season is April through November.
Things to Do: Low. If you enjoy the beach and water sports, you should be fine. If you are a cultural lover I would say low.
Social Considerations: Low. When you move to a small town like this, you have to be able to bring the party with you. Or, you have to be an organizer. Start a book club, a cooking club, a yoga club. Otherwise, your life here is pretty much centered around the beach or tourism here. You will want to learn Spanish if you decide to settle here.
Expats: Low. If you like hanging out with expats, you will find them here just walking around. Strike up a conversation. Normally I recommend finding them through various Facebook Expat pages. But I searched and couldn’t find any for Mazunte or Zipolite.
Real Estate: We didn’t see any homes for sale in Zipolite or Mazunte. I never recommend buying until you have lived somewhere at least 3 years.
Mazunte-Zipolite Desirability Score: Low. Unless you love living in really small towns near the beach with very little history or cultural opportunities, the overall desirability is low here. But for a place to visit that has a nice slow pace to unplug and unwind on a beautiful beach, you will love it.
Mazunte-Zipolite Facts and History
Very little is known about the pre-hispanic people that lived in Mazunte. Only that the Aztecs has a military enclave at Punta Cometa where the sea could be observed for 180 degrees for defense purposes.
By the 1970s, the Mazunte area was mainly known for the capture and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of sea turtles which had become popular meat in Mexico at the time.
But the slaughter of turtles became so widespread that turtle nests dropped from about 900,000 to less than one tenth of that per year. Turtle exploitation was banned in 1990 causing many families in Mazunte to lose their source of income.
The government is now promoting ecotourism as a way to replace income in the area.
Zipolite was first and best known as the only legal public nude beach in Mexico and retains much of the hippie character that encouraged nudity back in the 70s. You smell marajuana almost everywhere you walk in Zipolite.
Zipolite became known for the free-love hippie culture in the 70s when there was very little police presence due to the lack of roads. But it has maintained the hippie reputation and nudity ever since. You will see police ride past nude people walking on the beach. You will also see people doing yoga on the beach completely naked.
Annually on the first weekend of February each year, Zipolite hosts Festival Nudista Zipolite.
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