Mazatlán is a working Pacific port with a restored nineteenth-century old town at one end and a long hotel strip at the other, and the best way around it is a pulmonía — the open-sided taxis built on Volkswagen running gear that exist in this city and nowhere else.
On the water: sport fishing is the old reputation, with sailfish and marlin offshore, and the fleet is serious. Boats run out to the Islas Tres Hermanas off the malecón for snorkelling and birds, and to Isla de la Piedra, the long quiet beach across the harbour reached by a five-minute panga from the Playa Sur embarcadero.
Inland, the colonial mining villages of Concordia and Copala are an hour up into the sierra and are the standard half-day out.
Mazatlán's own spectacle is free: the clavadistas, cliff divers who jump from a platform on the malecón at Glorieta Sánchez Taboada, timing it to an incoming swell. And Carnaval, in February, is the third-largest in the world and fills the entire city.