About
The Lakeside Guide is provided as a free public service to benefit local shopkeepers, artisans, and artists, while educating & informing the foreign community living at Lake Chapala, Mexico.
It was created by Dane Strom — I’m a professional web designer, developer, photographer. After seven years as an editorial assistant for The Denver Post, I quit my job in 2010 at age 27 and moved to Ajijic, Mexico.
After eight years in this small town, nearly all of the business owners, artists and other people featured on this website are my friends, neighbors and acquaintances, people I run into on a daily basis. Most everyone in Ajijic knows who I am by now, either by sight or my nickname, Shaggy.
That’s why, at this point, the guide is still mainly focused on Ajijic and not yet on the surrounding towns. And until there are more businesses included, I’ve also intentionally avoided some of the shops and restaurants the foreign community already frequents and finds popular.
None of the businesses have paid me to appear here, so you can be assured that I’ve selected them because I think they are worthy of your business and you should know about them.
This site originally launched in 2011 but was offline for a while. It’s back now in 2018 with improved design and usability, plus some new businesses which have popped up over the last few years.
WHAT’S COMING SOON?
I’ve spent hundreds of hours taking photos, designing and developing this site, and then creating the content for this virtual guide to Ajijic. However, it is still, I feel, inadequate and incomplete and I’ll be making the following improvements throughout 2019:
- 100 more restaurants, shops, hotels, and artists.
- I’ll be adding short descriptive captions to each of the 2,600+ photos already on the site as well as general text descriptions for each business.
- I’ll be adding more helpful information to each place, such as restaurant menus and more detailed day trip directions in the What to Do section.
Please let me know if you have any suggestions to add to this site in the categories: restaurants and food/drink, artisans, hotels and other places to stay, body/mind, things to do, artists, and places to shop.
For more information click Lakeside Guide
The Mazatlan Post
