Who painted the five new pedestrian crosswalks that appeared near Hortensias this summer? Who fixed the road grate that used to catch every scooter tire at the Hortensias and Highway 200 intersection? And who has been walking down to Calle Santa Barbara every few weeks with a clipboard, watching a hillside slowly give way?
Not the city, at least not on its own initiative. In every case the answer is the same group of more than 300 members, residents and business owners alike, who make up the Amapas Neighborhood Association, known around the colonia simply as ANA.
If you live in Amapas, or spend enough time here to notice the murals on the Abedul stairs or the new garbage container north of Villa Tizoc, you've already benefited from work this group did without necessarily knowing it exists. That's worth correcting, because once you see how ANA actually operates, the neighborhood reads differently. The things that make Amapas feel cared for aren't municipal defaults. They're the output of a volunteer organization that raises its own money, runs its own inspections, and negotiates with the city on your behalf whether you've heard of it or not.
A Neighborhood Council With a Bigger Job Than Its Name Suggests
ANA was founded in 2002 and holds official standing with the city as Amapas's Junta Vecinal, its legally recognized neighborhood council. That title carries real weight. Since many Amapas residents aren't Mexican citizens, ANA functions as the primary bridge between the colonia and government offices, the entity that keeps neighborhood priorities on the agenda at City Hall meetings that most residents will never attend themselves. Its recent wins include road improvements on Calle Hortensias, crosswalk repainting and new pedestrian sidewalks along Highway 200, and the full renovation of the Amapas stairs.
None of that happened because the city budgeted for it. It happened because a group of neighbors organized, asked, and in several cases paid for it themselves.
What $59,000 in Neighbor Money Actually Bought
The clearest example is the Abedul stairs, the steep concrete passage connecting Highway 200 down to Playa de los Muertos that hundreds of people use every day. By 2023 the stairs, railings, and lighting had deteriorated badly enough that ANA describes the area as having become a hub for drug activity. So the association launched a citizen fundraising campaign in April of that year with a goal of $50,000 USD. Neighbors and donors ended up giving $59,000, funding new concrete stairs, railings, improved lighting, and landscaping at a total cost of roughly 1.4 million pesos, all without a peso from the municipal budget.
Once the structure was rebuilt, ANA commissioned local muralist Danyol León, known around town as Tamale Ringwald, to paint the stairway. More than 40 volunteers spent a weekend applying 60 liters of paint donated by Benjamin Moore Mexico, and the finished project was unveiled in November 2024.
The same machine kept running through this summer. According to ANA's own update from mid-July, the association delivered five new pedestrian crosswalks, repaired the road grate at the Hortensias and Highway 200 intersection, installed a new garbage container near Villa Tizoc thanks to a private donor, ran an electronics recycling drive in June, added new plaques to the community memorial wall, and organized a relief drive sending food and disaster supplies to earthquake victims in Venezuela. Small projects, none of them city-funded, all of them visible if you know to look.
The Harder Test: Calle Santa Barbara
Rebuilding a stairway with donated paint is one kind of problem. A hillside that's actively failing is another, and Amapas has one of those right now.
Calle Santa Barbara is a public street, which on paper makes it the city's responsibility. But the instability underneath it traces back to construction on an adjacent private project, the Serena development. Years ago, as part of that project's approval, the developer agreed to improve Calle Santa Barbara once construction wrapped, rebuild the stairs down to the beach, and preserve a tree that had long stood in the roadway. Engineers and geologists later flagged instability in the hillside, and a resident-formed group calling itself the Save Calle Santa Barbara committee began working alongside ANA to monitor the situation.
The most recent inspection, conducted jointly by ANA, the committee, and city officials on April 30, 2026, found the problem had gotten significantly worse. The compacted dirt road is now completely gone in sections due to work on retaining wall anchors. The final curved stretch of the street no longer exists. The retaining wall protecting Villa Sausalito is badly damaged and at risk of collapse. As ANA put it in its own public update:
This is no longer a simple repair. It is now a major infrastructure issue.
Because Santa Barbara is a public street, the city carries legal and financial responsibility for fixing it. ANA has been explicit that its own role is limited to acting as a link between the community and the city, not to fund the repair itself. That's an important distinction. The same organization that raised $59,000 to rebuild a public stairway has no comparable authority to compel a hillside repair tied to a private development's construction. What it can do, and has done, is get engineers on site, keep pressure on city officials, and make sure residents aren't finding out about a dangerous street secondhand.
Why the Mechanism Matters More Than the Mural
This is the part that's easy to miss if you only see the finished stairs and the fundraiser flyers. Living day to day in Amapas means relying on a system with three separate owners: the city holds legal responsibility for public infrastructure, private developers carry conditions attached to their own projects, and a volunteer association with no tax authority and no construction budget supplies the monitoring, the meetings, and often half the money that actually gets something fixed. When something like Santa Barbara goes wrong, there's no single phone number that guarantees a fast answer. There's a committee, a WhatsApp thread, and a rotating schedule of who checked the retaining wall this week.
ANA runs a Neighborhood Watch WhatsApp group that gives residents a direct line to local police for non-emergency concerns, joinable by contacting the association's administrator. Proceeds from the association's fundraisers now fund a broader effort called the Road to Safety initiative, aimed at improving highway safety, supporting residents affected by the Santa Barbara situation, and building out emergency evacuation planning for the neighborhood.
That planning has an obvious deadline attached to it. Pacific cyclone season runs from May 15 through November 30, and forecasters are expecting 18 to 21 named storms this year. As of today, Amapas is in the middle of that window, which makes the hillside monitoring on Santa Barbara and the evacuation planning under Road to Safety active concerns rather than abstract ones.
How to Actually Meet the People Running Things
ANA's calendar gives residents several concrete entry points into the organization, not just donation requests.
| Date | Event | Venue | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 28, 2026 | January Meet & Greet | One Six One, Calle Rodolfo Gómez 161 | Social mixer for neighbors and prospective volunteers |
| Mar 3, 2026 | Annual General Meeting | The Palm Cabaret and Bar | Record turnout, with more than 40 percent of member households participating |
| Mar 14, 2026 | Rock the River, 3rd annual | La Huerta BBQ & Grill, Paso Ancho | Live music from THE LOVERS, proceeds funded the Road to Safety initiative |
| Nov 18, 2026 | Rock the River, 4th annual | AWAYSIS Restaurant & Bar, Zona Romántica | Live music from Las Mambas, tickets 350 pesos |
The 2026 board, for reference, is Gary Green as president, Steve Clarke as treasurer, Will Murdoch as secretary, Dawn Stephens and Jaime Tril as members at large, and Viviana Teston as administrator. These are volunteers, not paid staff, and the first three dates above have already come and gone this year. The fourth Rock the River, the one at AWAYSIS, is still ahead on the calendar.
The Actual Takeaway
The stairs you climb, the crosswalk you cross without thinking about it, the WhatsApp alert that warns you a street is closed: none of it is guaranteed by living in Puerto Vallarta. It exists because a few hundred neighbors decided the city's baseline wasn't good enough and organized to close the gap themselves, one fundraiser and one board meeting at a time. Santa Barbara is the current proof that the arrangement has limits. The city still has to show up for the parts that are legally its job.
Daniel Alvarez Real Estate pays attention to details like these because they shape what daily life actually feels like in a neighborhood long before any of it shows up in a listing. If you want to talk about what's changing in Amapas, or anywhere else along the bay, get in touch.
