Where Highway 200 gives way to a dirt road shaded by palm and dry-forest canopy sits Arroyo Seco, one of the last unspoiled corners of Jalisco's Costalegre coast. This is where Xochiraíz has planted its roots: on a stretch of tropical dry forest and beachfront where regeneration isn't a marketing word, it's the daily work.

 

Arroyo Seco is a small coastal community between Puerto Vallarta to the north and Manzanillo to the south. Unlike the resort corridors of Vallarta or Nuevo Vallarta, Costalegre has stayed rural and low-key: fishing villages, mountain ridgelines dropping straight into the Pacific and long stretches of beach. It's remote enough that cell signal is patchy and the roads are still dirt — which is precisely why the land here has stayed intact.

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The broader Costalegre region has long been known for ecotourism, surf and a slower pace than its more developed neighbors. A new international airport at Chalacatepec has begun to open the region up, but much of Costalegre, including Arroyo Seco, remains defined by what it doesn't have: high-rises, crowds, and paved-over coastline.

 

That's the setting Xochiraíz works within. A place where regenerative land practices can still make a real, visible difference, and where a small cohort of students can see an entire watershed, forest and coastline in the same afternoon.