Puerto Vallarta, Mexico – It is always nice to see folks opening businesses that address a specific niche, particularly when there are not many pre-existing local sources for a particular line of products. When I learned that an acquaintance had opened a new Mexican sombrero store in the heart of Pitillal, we had to go take a look!
The shop is called Casa Vaquera and it is owned by Antonio de Jesús Rodríguez Guerrero, who hails from San Francisco del Rincón, a city and municipality in the western part of the state of Guanajuato, considered the ultimate source of Mexican sombreros. He also carries a variety of accessories, including leather products sourced from Leon, Guanajuato, the leather and shoe capital of Mexico.
Setting up shop in the heart of Pitillal made sense. “There are many vaqueros and rancheros here,” commented Antonio, referring to the many Mexican cowboys and ranchers that live and/or work in the town and its vicinities. “Surprisingly, there are not that many shops that carry quality hats.”
Since opening at the end of September 2019, Casa Vaquera has become the de-facto source of Mexican hats for men and women of all kinds. “We get a lot of gay Mexican and foreign clientele,” he adds.
And while going all the way to Pitillal from, say, Emiliano Zapata may seem like a hike, consider this: one of my friends shopped for a hat at Casa Vaquera and a few days later, she spotted the same hat at the Marsol Market for four times as much!
Casa Vaquera is located at Emiliano Zapata 321-C in El Pitillal. For more information, visit their Facebook page.
A musician-turned-multimedia journalist, Paco Ojeda has been living in Puerto Vallarta since December 2001, describing the city and its surroundings through words, pictures and short videos for local, national and international publications ever since. Visit his website, Paco-Ojeda.com, for interesting news, articles, interviews, and reviews created with the approximately 35,000 US citizens and other anglophones living in Puerto Vallarta, in mind.
