Acapulco, Mexico: La Quebrada Cliff Divers, Fort San Diego, and Pacific Coast Pozole

La Quebrada, a narrow ocean inlet on the west side of Acapulco's bay, is where divers have plunged from a rocky cliff face to the sea 35 metres below since 1934. The dives — now performed by a cooperative of professionals who have trained since childhood — require the divers to time their jump precisely with incoming swells to hit water deep enough to survive the entry. Performances happen multiple times daily at the Hotel El Mirador viewing platform, which overlooks the cleft and the ocean below; an evening performance includes a torchlit dive. The precision and the audacity of the dive, performed in a geological location that makes it visually vertiginous, is a genuine spectacle regardless of any individual's tolerance for cliff-jumping as entertainment.

Fort San Diego, built in 1617 and rebuilt in 1783 after the original was destroyed by earthquake, is a star-shaped defensive fortification on the waterfront of the Old Town quarter (La Quebrada area), now a well-organized history museum covering Acapulco's role in the Manila Galleon trade — the trans-Pacific route that carried silver from Mexican mines to Manila in exchange for Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices from 1565 to 1815. The fort is in good condition and the museum's presentation of the galleon trade and the city's colonial history is among the stronger provincial history museums in Mexico.

Old Acapulco — the area around La Quebrada and Fort San Diego — is a functionally different city from the Costera (the 10-kilometre resort hotel strip along the bay), and experiencing both gives a clearer sense of what Acapulco actually is. The Costera's beaches (Condesa, Icacos) are wide Pacific strands with consistent surf, beachfront clubs, and the infrastructure of a major resort zone. Old Acapulco's food market (Mercado Central) sells the Guerrero coastal kitchen: fresh Pacific shrimp prepared in half a dozen ways, pozole guerrerense (a white hominy and pork soup lighter in style than the red Jalisco pozole), and the chili-lime preparations that characterize Pacific coast Mexico.

Pie de la Cuesta is a narrow strip of land 12 kilometres west of Acapulco separating a lagoon (Coyuca Lagoon) from the open Pacific — one side rough surf, the other a calm freshwater lagoon used for water skiing and boat tours into the mangroves. The sunset from the Pacific side at Pie de la Cuesta, with the rough surf in the foreground and the mountains behind the city on the eastern horizon, is the specific view that appeared in photographs documenting Acapulco's mid-century celebrity era. The restaurants and palapas along the strip serve the same Pacific shrimp and fish as the city market, at slightly lower prices than the Costera.