Marietas Islands Park Fee And Conservation Wristband Explained

Every visitor to the Marietas Islands pays a federal rights fee, and the ticket for it is a wristband called the Brazalete de la Conservacion. The official rate is MXN 125 per person per day, set by CONANP, the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas, which administers the park. The fee exists because the islands are a protected national park, not a commercial beach.

What trips readers up is not the amount, which is modest, but the inconsistency of the tour market around it. Some listings fold the fee into the ticket price. Others quote a low fare and then list a stack of peso and dollar add-ons payable on the day. A few say nothing either way, which is its own kind of answer. This guide lays out exactly what CONANP publishes, who qualifies for a discount or an exemption, and then goes tour by tour so you can see, at a glance, which operators include the fee and which do not.

What Is The Fee To Enter The Marietas Islands National Park?

The entry fee for the Marietas Islands National Park is MXN 125 per person per day, charged as a federal rights payment and collected by CONANP. The park is open Tuesday to Sunday from 8:00 to 18:00, and the Hidden Beach site, Playa del Amor, is open Wednesday to Sunday from 8:00 to 17:00. Foreign tourists pay the full amount with no discount.

That figure comes straight from the official CONANP page for the park, which lists the fee, the hours and the eight visitor rules in one place. You can read the current details on the CONANP park page yourself before you travel. The fee is per day, not per tour, so a visitor who goes out on two separate boat days pays it twice unless an exemption applies.

Two things follow from the park's structure. First, access is by boat only, through authorized private tourism providers of Banderas Bay in Nayarit and Jalisco; there is no walk-in gate where you could pay at a booth and wander in. Second, the fee and the boat ticket are separate products in principle, even when a tour operator bundles them. Operators need their own CONANP authorization to bring visitors into the park, and part of that authorization covers collecting the rights payment, which is why so many listings handle the wristband for you in practice, listed or not.

The rules attached to the fee are worth knowing because rangers enforce them on the water. Life jackets are mandatory in the water. Alcohol is prohibited, as is littering and removing or introducing animals. Single-use plastics are banned. Reef-friendly sunscreen must be applied at least 30 minutes before you get in. CONANP recommends light beach clothing and swimwear and does not allow footwear for water or beach activities. None of this costs extra; all of it is part of what the fee protects.

The distances explain the price spread you will see elsewhere on this site. CONANP lists Punta de Mita at 9 km from the islands, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle at 11.84 nautical miles, Sayulita at 12.68, Nuevo Nayarit at 15.96 and Puerto Vallarta at 34 km. If the money question interests you, the full cost breakdown lives in how much a Marietas tour costs.

What Is The Brazalete De La Conservacion Wristband?

The Brazalete de la Conservacion is the conservation wristband that CONANP issues as proof of the MXN 125 daily rights payment. It is bought through CONANP's own platform or on site, and operators holding park authorization may collect it for you as part of a tour. Without the wristband, or a listing that includes the fee, a visitor has not paid for park entry.

Think of the wristband as the park's ticket, equivalent to a national park pass in the United States or Canada, but sold per person per day and worn on your arm. The purchase page lives on CONANP's wristband platform if you want to see the mechanism yourself.

Why does this matter for a tour buyer? Because the wristband is the item that makes a tour price complete or incomplete. A listing that includes the CONANP bracelet and the park permits quotes a number you can budget against. A listing that excludes it quotes a number plus roughly MXN 125 per person, sometimes more, payable in cash on the day. The featured tour on this site, the Eco Explorer Vallarta snorkel trip from Marina Vallarta with the optional Hidden Beach landing, lists the CONANP bracelet, official park access permits and a conservancy donation as included in its $99 per person fare, which is one reason it anchors the site's recommendations. If Hidden Beach itself is your goal, read the Hidden Beach guide next, because the landing is a separate optional cash fee on that tour.

Here is a tour this site compares for fee transparency, with all fees included in the listing:

The wristband also carries the park's conservation logic, which is not decoration. Playa del Amor was closed by CONANP on 9 May 2016 for coral restoration and reopened under strict conditions after University of Guadalajara experts confirmed the restoration was progressing. The 2016 reopening rules CONANP set, which operators still describe, allowed at most 116 visitors a day at Playa del Amor, in supervised groups of at most 15 people at low tide, with 30 minutes per group from leaving the boat, helmets and flotation vests compulsory and no fins, mask or snorkel at the beach entrance; CONANP has published no update to those numbers.

Do Marietas Island Tour Prices Include The Park Fee?

Some do and some do not, and the only reliable answer is per listing. Five of the tours on this site state the park or government fee is included, among them the featured Eco Explorer Vallarta snorkel tour, the Punta de Mita Hidden Beach trip by Marieta Sport Fishing, and the Punta de Mita snorkeling safari with a local guide. Most others list the fee, or a stack of fees, as excluded, and several say nothing either way.

This is the single most useful table on the page, so it is worth reading closely. The "fee status" column below shows what each listing states. Where the column says "not stated," it does not mean the fee is free, and it does not mean you will be charged; it means the listing is silent and you should ask before booking. The featured listing is worth a look for contrast: it lists the CONANP bracelet, the park permits and a conservancy donation as included while flagging a US$6 government fee and the optional Hidden Beach entrance as cash extras, a level of detail most competitors do not offer.

A pattern worth naming: distance and fee transparency tend to move together. The big Puerto Vallarta catamarans more often quote a fare and then list the federal bracelet, the dock tax and sometimes a port fee as separate cash items. Neither approach is hidden; both are printed on the listings. The failure mode is assuming, and assumption is exactly what the planning stage is for.

One more caution that saves arguments at check-in: the CONANP wristband and the various port and dock taxes are different things. A listing can include the park fee and still charge a marina fee, or vice versa. The Live & Travel Tours catamaran, for instance, lists a MXN 35 dock tax and a MXN 220 CONANP and Semarnat charge as excluded, while the Altus Tours catamaran lists a US$3 dock fee and a US$10 SEMARNAT and CONANP bracelet as excluded, each attributed to its own listing.

Who Pays Less Than MXN 125 At The Marietas Islands?

CONANP exempts four groups entirely: children under 12, older adults, pensioners and retirees, and people with disabilities, all with a credential shown at entry. Students and teachers with a valid credential get a 75 percent discount, and Mexican nationals plus foreign residents of Mexico with official documents get 50 percent off. Foreign tourists without those documents pay the full MXN 125.

The discounts come straight from the official fee schedule on the CONANP park page. The catch is documentary: every reduced rate depends on a credential shown at entry, so a student ID card in your wallet takes 75 percent off the daily rate, and a Mexican resident card takes half off. Children under 12 pay nothing for the park itself, though the boat ticket is a separate matter and each listing sets its own child pricing; one Puerto Vallarta Net listing, for instance, notes children ages 3 to 5 pay MXN 200 direct at check-in, a boat fare, not a park fee.

For a family of four with two school-age children, the arithmetic changes the day's cost meaningfully: two adult wristbands at the full rate and two exempt children means half of the park outlay a party of four full-price adults would face, before any boat ticket. Families planning around this should also read the site's guide to Marietas Islands with kids and non-swimmers, since age limits on boats and on the Hidden Beach landing are set per operator, not per park. The featured Eco Explorer listing, for example, states the snorkel tour is for ages 6 to 70 and the optional Hidden Beach landing has a minimum age of 10 with an adult and a maximum of 65, all listing-specific numbers.

Which Extra Peso Fees Do Marietas Tour Listings Add On The Day?

The most common cash add-ons across these tours are a SEMARNAT or CONANP bracelet of MXN 220, a dock or port tax of MXN 35 to MXN 100, and in a few cases a US$20 conservation fee. Each figure belongs to one listing only, so read them per tour, never as a general price for the park or the Hidden Beach landing.

The table below gathers the fee lines the listings themselves print in their "not included" sections, attributed tour by tour. Note how little consistency there is: the SEMARNAT bracelet appears as MXN 220 on one catamaran, MXN 180 on a Monkey Adventures México trip and US$10 on another, because each operator words and prices its own compliance differently. None of these is the official CONANP MXN 125 daily rate, though several sit close to it; they are the operator's bundled collection of federal and port charges as that listing states them.

Two practical readings fall out of this. First, when you compare a from $79 ticket with a from $130 ticket, add the excluded lines to the cheaper one before concluding it is a bargain; on some catamarans the gap closes fast. Second, bring cash, in pesos, in small bills. Nearly every excluded line above is collected at check-in or on the boat, and several listings say "cash only" explicitly, including the featured tour's optional Hidden Beach entrance, which that listing prices at MXN 600 per person in cash, and the Vallarta Nature Trips listing from Punta de Mita, which prices the same optional landing at MXN 900 per person payable to the captain. Those two figures are listing prices for an optional extra, not park fees, and never a promise of entry: access still depends on tide, sea state and the park's daily rules.

The Hidden Beach landing question deserves its own reading, and the site keeps one at Hidden Beach rules, closure days and visitor limits, including why no operator can promise the beach ahead of the day. The general packing question, cash included, is covered in what to bring to the Marietas Islands.

For travelers who would rather skip the fee arithmetic altogether, the small-boat operators around Punta de Mita are the cleanest option. The Marieta Sport Fishing trip titled "Hidden Beach, All Fees Included" states all fees and taxes in its $156 per person fare, and the Punta de Mita snorkeling safari with a local guide, from $369 per group for up to six people, lists port taxes and the Marietas package taxes in the price.

Another fee-clean structure appears on the Shark's Tours side of the same peninsula: the listing card-named "Shark's Hidden Beach, 3 Hours" lists its admission ticket to the beach in the itinerary and excludes only private transportation and lunch, from $157 per person with 4.8 from 161 reviews.

Where And When Do You Get The Wristband For Hidden Beach?

In practice you receive the wristband from your tour operator, at check-in or on the boat, when the listing includes the fee or when the crew collects it on CONANP's behalf. If your listing excludes it, you pay the listed cash amount at the meeting point. The park itself is open Tuesday to Sunday, and the Playa del Amor site Wednesday to Sunday, so the wristband buys entry only on the days each is open.

The day-of-week detail matters more than most visitors expect, because it is the one fee-adjacent fact no refund fixes. Book any tour for a Monday and the park is closed; book for a Tuesday and the park is open but Hidden Beach is not, per the official CONANP hours. Listings run on those schedules, which is why the fee discussion and the calendar discussion belong together. The reopening notice CONANP published in 2016, recorded in the official press release, set the two-closure-day week and the 116-visitors-a-day figure at Playa del Amor as 2016 reopening rules operators still describe, with no later update.

What the wristband does not buy is the Hidden Beach landing. Even on a tour that includes the CONANP bracelet and the park permits, entry through the rock passage depends on tide, sea state and the daily limits, and operators cannot confirm it ahead of time; the Ecotours Vallarta listing states this plainly, saying operators cannot guarantee entrance to Hidden Beach in advance. The swim itself varies by listing: the sightseeing tour states about 60 meters through the rocky passage, and one Puerto Vallarta snorkeling listing states about 250 meters from the boat, both attributed to their own listings with no general tunnel length published.

Booking-stage travelers weighing the snorkel-focused Eco Explorer option against bigger catamarans can compare on the site's small group versus large boat guide. The Eco Explorer tour caps at 16 travelers and lists light snacks rather than lunch, while the all-inclusive catamarans run to 66, 75 or 100 travelers with breakfast, lunch and open bar; the fee lines differ accordingly, as the tables above show.

Is The Park Fee Refunded If Your Marietas Tour Is Cancelled?

** Most listings on this site offer a full refund if you cancel at least 24 hours before start time, and tours can be cancelled for sea conditions, in which case the listing's own terms govern. Ask the operator how an already-issued wristband is handled.**

The 24-hour cancellation line appears nearly word for word across these tours, from the featured Eco Explorer tour to the Vallarta Adventures trips to the Punta de Mita small boats, and the all-inclusive listings on the platform side carry the same terms. That makes the fee question mostly moot at booking time: cancel more than 24 hours out and you have typically paid nothing you cannot get back, wristband included, because nothing has been collected yet. The awkward window is the day itself, when sea conditions close the crossing or the port authority stops navigation; there is no standing official document on weather closures beyond the simple fact that tours can be cancelled for sea conditions, and each operator handles rescheduling and refunds under its own stated policy.

Weather-side planning has its own guide, including the hurricane-season question and the monthly rain and sea-temperature numbers, at do Marietas Islands tours run in hurricane season and the best time to visit the Marietas Islands. The short fee-side version: book with a 24-hour-refund listing, keep the receipt, and treat any cash collected at check-in as part of the tour transaction you can discuss with the operator, not with the park.

How Do You Budget The Total Cost With The Fee Included?

Take the tour's from price, add every excluded fee line its listing prints, add the optional Hidden Beach landing if the listing offers one, and compare the totals rather than the headlines. The firm per-person fares across these tours run from $67 to $168, before add-ons, and the only firm per-group price is $369 for a private boat with a local guide for up to six people.

The comparison happens after the additions. A from $79 catamaran ticket plus a US$20 conservation fee and MXN 40 port fee lands close to a from $99 fee-included small-group tour. A from $156 all-fees-included trip from Punta de Mita needs no additions at all but no lunch. None of this makes one format the winner; it makes the fee column the tiebreaker it should have been all along, which is why this site prints it per listing.

Notice that the featured listing appears in the middle of that ladder rather than at either end, which is deliberate: it is the fee-transparent middle, from $99 per person with 4.8 from 1,033 reviews, the CONANP bracelet and permits included, and a clearly priced optional landing. Travelers who want that same structure with a bigger boat can check the live listing for the Vallarta Adventures options, and travelers who want the paperwork gone entirely can check dates for Optional Hidden Beach, Snacks Included before dates fill. Booking ahead matters in fee terms as much as in comfort terms: the park's daily limits and the beach's two closure days concentrate demand onto the remaining five mornings.

Children under 12, older adults, pensioners, retirees and people with disabilities are exempt with a credential; students and teachers pay 75 percent less and Mexican nationals and foreign residents 50 percent less.