What Made Mexico's Most Mysterious Beach? Brandon Presser - The Daily Beast
go to original October 17, 2014

It’s sunset in the pre-Columbian wilds of Nayarit. The jays silence their song as night falls. The jaguars lurk nearby. Smoke rises above the canopy as gentle chanting rumbles across the jungle floor. The Huichol—ancient dwellers of Mexico’s Pacific coast—burn flowers and seeds in honor of their gods. They sing songs and recite prayers in order to maintain the holy balance of nature between Father Sun and Mother Ocean.

“For thousands of years the Huichol have performed these sacred rituals,” explains Enrique Alejos, the cultural concierge at the Four Seasons Punta Mita. “The masculine deities of light and the female goddesses of the dark work in unison through dutiful tribute in order to protect the precarious lives of the indigenous people.” And the gods’ Olympus, if you will, is a small couplet of islands just beyond the luxury hotel, where the sun rejoins the sea after its daily journey across the clouds.

Uninhabited by humans since its explosive inception over five million years ago, the volcanic Marieta Islands symbolized the tangible union of sea and sky to the god-fearing Huichol. But when modern-day conservationists surveyed the offshore rocks they discovered something even more ethereal lurking within.

At the center of Isla Redonda was a quirk of nature seen only on the pages of a fantasy novel — a sandy beach carved into the rounded core of the island like the hole of donut. Although completely invisible from the shoreline, a bird's eye view reveals lapping crystal waters and an empty dune like dazzling colors at the end of kaleidoscope's funnel.

“You see a lot of bizarre geological formations from limestone, like in the Thailand, but with volcanic rocks it’s much more surprising to find a beach encased in stone like this,” posits Dr. Benjamin Black, a volcanologist and post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkley. “Volcanic rocks tell a continuing story from the moment they form after an eruption. This tale of erosion — the slow grind of the sea against the rocks — is particularly unique.”

But there’s an added twist. Before the area fell under the jurisdiction of Mexico’s national park system, the lonely islands were used as a bombing test site by country’s military.

For years the government detonated explosives on the Marietas, far away from human contact, until a movement led by Jacques Cousteau encouraged the navy to cease their testing in order to protect the surrounding reefs and delicate breeding grounds of the migrating humpback whales.

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