Is Bahía de Banderas the same place as Puerto Vallarta?

Not quite. Banderas Bay is the whole bay, and it straddles two states: Puerto Vallarta sits on its southern shore in Jalisco, while the north shore (Nuevo Vallarta, Bucerías, La Cruz, Punta Mita, Litibú, Sayulita, San Pancho) is in Nayarit and is what people usually mean by Riviera Nayarit. Bahía de Banderas is also the name of the Nayarit municipality covering much of that north shore, which is why the term turns up on listings for houses that are nowhere near Vallarta. When you tell us where you want to be, name the village rather than the bay and we'll get it right first time.

How long is the drive from Puerto Vallarta airport to Sayulita or Punta Mita?

Figure on around forty minutes to Sayulita from the airport, and roughly an hour out to Punta Mita, with traffic on Highway 200 as the main variable. Bucerías is much closer, about twenty minutes from Vallarta itself. Between Punta Mita and Sayulita it's twenty to thirty minutes over the peninsula road, which is short enough that guests staying at either end tend to treat both as home base.

We want to surf in March. Which part of the bay should we base ourselves in?

North shore. Sayulita's beach break is the best-known surf in this part of the bay and the village is organised around it, with the Friday farmers market and the walk up Gringo Hill as the non-surfing part of the day. Punta Mita and Litibú put you within a half hour of it with considerably more quiet at night. Just be aware that March, Semana Santa in particular, is the busiest stretch of the year on this coast, so the gap between inquiry and booking matters more then than at any other time.

Do you have anything that's genuinely a two-bedroom on Banderas Bay right now?

The two homes we hold on that bay both sleep sixteen, so no, not in our current bookable inventory there. Write to us with your dates and group size anyway: we work across Puerto Vallarta and Riviera Nayarit as a licensed travel agency, our two-bedroom depth is strongest in Los Cabos, and if the right thing for your trip sits in Baja rather than Nayarit we'll say so rather than sell you the wrong house.

Is Bahía de Banderas the same place as Puerto Vallarta?

Not quite. Banderas Bay is the whole bay, and it straddles two states: Puerto Vallarta sits on its southern shore in Jalisco, while the north shore (Nuevo Vallarta, Bucerías, La Cruz, Punta Mita, Litibú, Sayulita, San Pancho) is in Nayarit and is what people usually mean by Riviera Nayarit. Bahía de Banderas is also the name of the Nayarit municipality covering much of that north shore, which is why the term turns up on listings for houses that are nowhere near Vallarta. When you tell us where you want to be, name the village rather than the bay and we'll get it right first time.

How long is the drive from Puerto Vallarta airport to Sayulita or Punta Mita?

Figure on around forty minutes to Sayulita from the airport, and roughly an hour out to Punta Mita, with traffic on Highway 200 as the main variable. Bucerías is much closer, about twenty minutes from Vallarta itself. Between Punta Mita and Sayulita it's twenty to thirty minutes over the peninsula road, which is short enough that guests staying at either end tend to treat both as home base.

We want to surf in March. Which part of the bay should we base ourselves in?

North shore. Sayulita's beach break is the best-known surf in this part of the bay and the village is organised around it, with the Friday farmers market and the walk up Gringo Hill as the non-surfing part of the day. Punta Mita and Litibú put you within a half hour of it with considerably more quiet at night. Just be aware that March, Semana Santa in particular, is the busiest stretch of the year on this coast, so the gap between inquiry and booking matters more then than at any other time.

Do you have anything that's genuinely a two-bedroom on Banderas Bay right now?

The two homes we hold on that bay both sleep sixteen, so no, not in our current bookable inventory there. Write to us with your dates and group size anyway: we work across Puerto Vallarta and Riviera Nayarit as a licensed travel agency, our two-bedroom depth is strongest in Los Cabos, and if the right thing for your trip sits in Baja rather than Nayarit we'll say so rather than sell you the wrong house.

Back to blog

Two-bedroom villas around Banderas Bay: how to choose

Banderas Bay coastline looking north from Bucerías toward the Punta Mita peninsula on a clear afternoon

Short answer first: our bookable inventory around Banderas Bay runs larger than two bedrooms, and the two homes we have on that bay are 7BD Exclusive Property On Beach at Punta del Burro, near Punta Mita, and The Mansion Riviera Nayarit in Las Jarretaderas, just over the Nayarit line from Puerto Vallarta. Both sleep sixteen. Neither is a two-bedroom. If a true two-bedroom villa is the hard requirement, say so when you write to us and we'll go looking; if the number you care about is really two couples, or a small family, with privacy, the rest of this page is about why a bigger house on this bay often costs less trouble and delivers more than a two-bedroom unit does.

Where on the bay you land changes the whole trip

Banderas Bay is wide, and the hour between its ends is the single biggest decision you'll make. The south shore gives you Puerto Vallarta itself, with the airport, the marina, the restaurants and the late nights, and Mismaloya tucked into jungle fifteen minutes south of Old Town. The north shore is a string of very different villages: Nuevo Vallarta with its golf and its long flat beach, Bucerías and La Cruz, then the private peninsula at Punta Mita, and past that Litibú, Sayulita and San Pancho.

From Puerto Vallarta, Bucerías is a twenty-minute run up the coast highway. Punta Mita takes closer to an hour, the last stretch along Highway 200 and then the peninsula road. Sayulita is about three quarters of an hour from town and a shade less from the airport, and from Punta Mita it's only twenty or thirty minutes over the hill, which is why people staying out at the point end up at the Sayulita farmers market on a Friday morning without planning to.

That geography sorts the trips cleanly. Surfers want to be north: Sayulita's beach break is the reason the village exists in its current form. Golfers want the peninsula or Nuevo Vallarta. Anyone whose evening involves Vallarta's bars and galleries should think hard before committing to a house an hour up the coast, because that drive back at midnight is the part nobody factors in.

The two houses we actually have on this bay

7BD Exclusive Property On Beach sits on a quiet private beach at Punta del Burro, out near Punta Mita. It was designed by Teodoro González de León, and it shows: a white concrete structure, minimalist geometry, open spaces running straight out to sand. Seven bedrooms, sleeps fourteen. It has a washer and free parking, which sounds dull until you've spent a week with sandy swimsuits and an hour's drive between you and anything.

The Mansion Riviera Nayarit is the other end of the bay and the other end of the aesthetic: 22,000 square feet in Las Jarretaderas, nine bedrooms, sleeps sixteen, with private bathrooms off the bedrooms and a long terrace with views across the bay. There's a community pool and a barbecue area. For a group that wants to be close to Vallarta and still have everyone under one roof with their own bathroom, this is the house that does it.

Both are bigger than what you asked for. That is worth sitting with rather than dismissing. Two couples in a seven-bedroom house on a private beach get the whole beach, a kitchen, parking and laundry, and the per-couple arithmetic on a large house split between four or six adults is frequently kinder than a two-bedroom villa at a brand-name resort during Semana Santa. If you are travelling as two and want two bedrooms and nothing more, these are the wrong houses and we'd rather tell you that now.

Private villa, resort residence, oceanfront suite: what you're really choosing between

We rent four things, and the labels matter more here than they do in most markets.

Private villas are standalone houses. Your pool, your gate, your kitchen, nobody's wristband. The Punta del Burro house is this in its purest form.
Resort residences are private homes that sit inside a resort, so you get a house and a front desk at once. Our Hacienda Encantada and Quivira residences in Los Cabos work this way, with butler and 24-hour concierge service handled by the resort.
Oceanfront suites and condos are the two-bedroom end of the market almost everywhere in Mexico. A two-bedroom at a full-service resort is usually a suite or a residence, not a detached villa, and if you search "two-bedroom villa" you'll find the word applied to both.

That last point is the one that saves people money and disappointment. The big resorts on this bay sell "two-bedroom villas" that are large suites with resort access attached. There's nothing wrong with them. But if you pictured a gate, a lawn and a pool of your own, the word is doing work it can't support, and it's worth asking what you're actually booking before the deposit goes in.

The amenities that decide a trip, and the ones that don't

Air conditioning, linens, a coffee maker: assume them. The ones that change a week are narrower than most listings suggest.

A private pool versus a shared one. On a bay where the surf is serious in places, a pool you don't share is what keeps a group home in the afternoon. We list private pools and private heated infinity pools across the portfolio; whether a given house has one, and whether heating is included or an add-on, is a per-property question and we'll answer it straight when you ask about a specific home.

A kitchen you'd actually cook in. The Las Jarretaderas mansion and the Punta del Burro house both have barbecue areas, and on this coast that matters more than an indoor range. You buy fish in the morning and cook it outside at six.

Laundry. Unglamorous, decisive. A washer means you pack for four days instead of nine.

Internet that holds. Half the people booking a villa here are extending a trip around a few working mornings. High-speed internet is standard across our homes; a dedicated workspace is not universal, so flag it if you need one.

What the concierge is for

Every stay comes with a dedicated concierge professional, and on this bay that's less about turndown theatre and more about distance. The useful requests are the practical ones: a private transfer from the airport so a group of eight isn't negotiating taxis at eleven at night, a chef for the evenings you don't want to drive, a boat out to the Marietas, a tee time, a table in Vallarta on a Saturday in March.

We're a licensed travel agency, which is why the chef bookings, the transport and the event planning run through one conversation rather than four. Booking direct with us also means no third-party platform fees on top of the nightly rate.

If Los Cabos is still on the table

It often is. People search Banderas Bay and Los Cabos in the same week because both promise the same thing: a Pacific coast, a private pool, a short flight. Our depth is in Cabo, and if a genuine two-bedroom is non-negotiable, it's worth asking what we hold there before you compromise on size here.

What's on the Cabo side gives you a sense of the range: Oceanview Villa - Private Pool Near St. Regis in Quivira includes a six-passenger golf cart with the stay, which in a hillside resort community is transport rather than a novelty. Casa Pueblo in San José del Cabo trades resort machinery for a quieter town and coastal views. 4BD Hacienda Encantada Resort, Ocean View & Pool is the residence-inside-a-resort model, a private villa with the resort's services behind it.

Tell us four things and we'll come back with real options

The fastest route to a short, accurate list is a message with these in it:

Dates, and how firm they are. Semana Santa and the March spring break weeks are the tightest on this coast, and a flexible night either side sometimes unlocks a house that looks gone.
How many adults, how many children, and how many of you need a bedroom with a door. "Two bedrooms" and "six people" are different requirements, and we'd rather solve the second.
North shore or south. Surf and quiet point you to Sayulita and Punta Mita. Restaurants, nightlife and a short airport run point you to Vallarta, Nuevo Vallarta and Bucerías.
Your nightly budget, before taxes. Published rates across our portfolio run from the low hundreds into the mid-thousands per night, and knowing where you sit saves us both a round of guessing.

Send that and we'll confirm what's genuinely available, in the locality you want, at the bedroom count you need, and tell you plainly when the answer is that we don't have it.

Share it with your friends:

Email X (Twitter)