🇲🇽 Mexico · The North and Baja California
Los Cabos is the southern end of the very long Baja California peninsula, that point on the map where the desert drops down to the sea and two oceans shake hands: the Sea of Cortez —which Jacques Cousteau called 'the aquarium of the world'— and the open Pacific. The result is a landscape unique in Mexico: dunes and cactus ending in cliffs of golden granite, beaches hidden among rock formations and a sea full of life, from whales and dolphins to marlin and manta rays.
The destination has two very different souls. Cabo San Lucas is the vibrant, festive face: its marina full of yachts, its bars and clubs, the lively Playa El Médano and, above all, El Arco, that rock formation at the very tip of the peninsula that is the symbol of the whole region. San José del Cabo, by contrast, is the serene and charming face: a municipal seat of colonial streets, its mission, a tree-lined square and an Art District of galleries that every Thursday in season holds its famous 'Art Walk'. In between, the Corredor Turístico lines up beaches and resorts.
This guide covers Los Cabos with a practical, warm eye: how to reach El Arco and Playa del Amor, which beaches are safe for swimming and which are only for looking at, when and how to see whales, how to get between San José and Cabo San Lucas, where to eat good fish and seafood and how to organize excursions to Todos Santos or La Paz. A destination of sun, sea and desert made for enjoying at your own pace, whether in luxury or with a backpack.
Long before tourism, the southern tip of Baja California was inhabited by the Pericú peoples, hunter-gatherers and skilled navigators who lived off fishing and the sea. The European arrival was early and violent: after the conquest of Mexico, expeditions pushed by Hernán Cortés explored the Gulf of California in the sixteenth century, and the region became a stage for the passage of the Manila Galleon and a refuge for pirates who preyed on that route. Effective colonization only came with the Jesuit missions in the eighteenth century; the Mission of San José del Cabo was founded in 1730. The epidemics brought by the Europeans decimated the Pericú, who all but disappeared. For almost two centuries, San José del Cabo and the then tiny Cabo San Lucas were small settlements living off fishing and farming. The big change came in the twentieth century: first as a sport-fishing destination for American magnates and celebrities in the middle of the century, and then with a decisive push in the seventies, when the Mexican state, through FONATUR, developed Los Cabos as a planned tourist destination, just like Cancún. The paving of the Transpeninsular Highway in 1973 finally connected the peninsula with the rest of the country. Since then, Los Cabos has grown into one of the most exclusive beach destinations in Mexico. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The southern end of the peninsula between the desert and the Sea of Cortés —Cousteau's 'aquarium of the world'—: land of rock paintings, Jesuit missions, gray whales and the luxury resorts of Los Cabos.
Read the history of Baja California Sur →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Los Cabos was a world-famous tourist destination, the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula was inhabited by the Pericú (also written pericú or pericúe), an Indigenous people who occupied the Cabo region and some islands of the Gulf of California. They were hunters, gatherers and, above all, skilled fishers and navigators, who drew on the enormous richness of the Sea of Cortez and lived in a desert and coastal setting that demanded a deep knowledge of the environment.
The Pericú organized themselves in semi-nomadic bands that moved with the seasons and the availability of food, gathering desert fruits such as pitahayas, along with shellfish, fish and small game. They built rafts of reeds or logs to travel between the coast and the islands, and they left evidence of their culture in rock paintings and in their funerary practices, which caught the attention of the first Europeans. Their language, now extinct, was different from those of other peoples on the peninsula, which has led scholars to debate their origin.
Contact with Europeans proved catastrophic for them. From the sixteenth century on, with the arrival of expeditions and, later, of missionaries, the Pericú suffered the impact of diseases they had no defenses against —such as smallpox and measles— on top of tensions with the mission system. In 1734 they led a great revolt against the missions (the so-called Pericú revolt), which was harshly put down. Between the epidemics, the conflicts and the uprooting, the Pericú people died out as a distinct culture over the course of the eighteenth century, leaving as their legacy their mark in the archaeology and in the memory of the territory.
The European arrival at the southern tip of the peninsula came early. After the conquest of Tenochtitlan, Hernán Cortés pushed a series of sea expeditions to explore the so-called 'Mar del Sur' (the Pacific) and look for new lands and riches. In 1535, Cortés himself reached the bay where La Paz now stands and tried, without lasting success, to found a settlement. For a time California was believed to be an island, an idea that took a long while to correct and that fed mistaken maps for decades.
The Cabo region gained strategic importance with one of the longest and richest trade routes in history: that of the Manila Galleon (the Nao de China), which for more than two centuries linked Acapulco with the Philippines, bringing silks, porcelain and spices from Asia. The galleons, loaded with extremely valuable goods, sailed off the coast of Baja California on their way back to Acapulco, and the tip of the peninsula was one of the points where they put in to take on water and provisions after crossing the Pacific.
That wealth turned the waters off Cabo into pirate and privateer territory. English and Dutch sailors —like the famous Thomas Cavendish, who in 1587 captured a treasure-laden galleon near Cabo San Lucas— prowled the area to raid the galleons. The inlets and bays at the southern tip of the peninsula served as hiding places and ambush points. For a long time, however, the region remained a territory practically unpopulated by Europeans, crossed by ships but with no stable settlements, until the missionaries arrived in the eighteenth century.
The effective colonization of the south of the peninsula did not come at the hands of soldiers or settlers, but of missionaries. From 1697 on, the Jesuits began a vast evangelizing enterprise in Baja California, founding a chain of missions that, through the eighteenth century, were the only stable European population centers in an immense, arid territory. The missions combined religious work with the organization of labor, farming and cattle raising, and they became the basis of the peninsula's future network of towns.
At the southern tip, the Mission of San José del Cabo Añuití was founded in 1730 by the Jesuit Nicolás Tamaral, near the coast and the estuary that still exists today. The location made strategic sense: the place had fresh water and could serve as a resupply point for the Manila galleons that passed off Cabo. The mission gathered the Pericú of the area into mission life, with dramatic consequences for that population.
Coexistence was tense and, at times, bloody. In the Pericú revolt of 1734, Father Tamaral was killed, and the mission went through difficult years. When the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish dominions in 1767, the missions passed first to the Franciscans and then to the Dominicans. By then, the epidemics had decimated the Indigenous population, and the settlements of Cabo —San José del Cabo and the hamlet of Cabo San Lucas— were left as small towns of fishers and farmers, far from the great centers of New Spain. That is how they would remain, modest and isolated, throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth.
Through the first half of the twentieth century, Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo were still small, isolated towns, living off fishing and a fledgling canning industry. The Baja California peninsula, separated from the rest of the country by the Sea of Cortez and by enormous desert distances, remained one of the most remote regions in Mexico, with no roads linking it to the mainland and with difficult access.
The first big change came by sea and by air, and through one very specific draw: sport fishing. In the middle of the twentieth century, the waters of the southern tip, extremely rich in marlin, sailfish and dorado, began to attract sportsmen, magnates and celebrities —many of them American— who arrived in yachts and private planes looking for record catches. The first hotels and fishing camps opened, and Cabo San Lucas began to earn its fame as an anglers' paradise, a reputation that in time would win it the nickname 'Marlin Capital of the World'.
That elite, exclusive, low-volume tourism was the seed of modern Los Cabos. Hollywood stars and figures of the international jet set began to frequent the area, drawn by the sea, the climate and the quiet. But while sport fishing put Los Cabos on the map for a privileged few, the region was still hard to reach for the general public. The mass takeoff would come only when the Mexican state decided to bet on planned tourism and, above all, when a highway finally connected the peninsula with the rest of the country.
The great leap for Los Cabos came in the 1970s, the result of two key decisions that turned a remote fishing town into one of the most important tourist destinations in Mexico. The first was building infrastructure: in 1973 the Transpeninsular Highway (Federal 1) opened, running the length of the Baja California peninsula from north to south, from Tijuana to Cabo San Lucas. For the first time, it was possible to reach the southern tip of the peninsula overland, breaking centuries of isolation.
The second decision was the state's bet on planned tourism. In those years, the Mexican government created the National Tourism Promotion Fund (FONATUR), the body charged with developing large tourist destinations from scratch, or close to it. Just as it had done with Cancún in the Caribbean, FONATUR identified the potential of Los Cabos and promoted the creation of infrastructure, services and a Corredor Turístico between San José del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas, laying the groundwork for the arrival of major hotel investment.
From then on, growth was rapid. The building and expansion of the international airport and the arrival of hotel chains, luxury resorts, golf courses and all-inclusives turned Los Cabos into a sun-and-beach destination of international standing, especially popular with travelers from the United States and Canada. In 1981 it was constituted as the municipality of Los Cabos, within the state of Baja California Sur. Today the destination combines that large-scale tourist development with its original essence —the sea, the fishing, the desert and the whales— and with the contrast between the party of Cabo San Lucas and the colonial calm of San José del Cabo. The trace of those Pericú, galleons and missionaries survives in the names and in the memory of a place that is still called, with reason, Land's End.