Costa Esmeralda palm-shaded cottage

The Costa Esmeralda is a fifty-kilometre strip of Veracruz coast between Nautla and Tecolutla that Mexico City escapes to and almost no foreign buyer has ever heard of. It is green rather than turquoise, the sand is grey-gold rather than white, and the coconut palms lean out over the water in a way that makes the whole coast look like a 1970s postcard. This 65-square-metre cottage sits 150 metres from that beach, under a stand of mature palms, for less than a million pesos.

The house is small and honest. A pastel-painted masonry cottage with a tiled roof, a deep front porch with hammock hooks at either end, two bedrooms, one bathroom, and an open kitchen-living space with wooden shutters and a ceiling fan. Floors are tile throughout. There is no air conditioning, though the Gulf breeze through the shutters handles most of the year and the porch is where people actually sit in any case. The garden holds coconut palms, a mango and a lime tree, and there is room for a small pool if a buyer wanted one.

This is a property for someone who wants the simplest possible version of coastal ownership. Running costs are negligible: predial (property tax) here runs a few hundred pesos a year, electricity is minimal without air conditioning, and there is no homeowners association, no service charge and no management company. A caretaker to check on the house and cut the grass costs very little by any international standard.

The beach is long, straight and startlingly empty on weekdays. Gulf water is warm and green, the surf gentle to moderate, and you can walk for a kilometre in either direction and pass a handful of people. Weekends and Mexican holiday periods bring families down from Puebla and Mexico City, the palapas fill up, and the strip briefly becomes lively before emptying out again on Sunday evening. That rhythm suits residents who want quiet with occasional company.

Veracruz food is one of the great regional cuisines of Mexico and it is on full display here: fish a la veracruzana with tomato, olives and capers, arroz a la tumbada, freshwater langostinos from the rivers, and coffee grown in the Coatepec highlands a couple of hours inland. Roadside palapas along the coast highway do all of it for a fraction of resort prices.

The region has real attractions beyond the beach. El Tajin, the extraordinary pre-Columbian city of the Totonac people and a UNESCO World Heritage site, is under two hours north. The Rio Filobobos and Rio Bobos offer some of the best accessible white-water rafting in Mexico. Coastal lagoons and wetlands nearby are important bird habitat, and the mountain towns of Xalapa and Coatepec, with their museums, coffee culture and cloud forest, are a comfortable day trip.

Access is genuinely good for somewhere this quiet. Mexico City is four hours by toll highway, which makes weekend use realistic in a way that most cheap Mexican coast is not. Poza Rica's airport is ninety minutes north and Veracruz International is two and a half hours south, both with regular domestic connections through Mexico City.

Buyers should be realistic about what this is. It is a modest, older cottage; the bathroom is dated, the kitchen is basic, and a buyer will want to budget perhaps 150,000 to 250,000 pesos to refresh finishes, re-seal the roof and update the plumbing. Hurricane and heavy rain events do affect this coast. And the market here is almost entirely domestic, so resale is to Mexican buyers rather than to an international pool. In exchange, at 980,000 pesos, you get a titled house with a garden and mature palms a two-minute walk from a warm sea, which is close to the cheapest legitimate way to own a beach house anywhere in North America.