Welcome to Los Cabos
Where the ocean flows into the horizon, and the sunset traces the glowing sands at the water's edge, you'll experience unparalleled bliss. Land's End is just the beginning of your encounter with the best that life has to offer. Relax, take in the wondrous nature of Los Cabos and discover the meaning of paradise.

Vibrant Legacy

By Nancy Clark

It's hard to imagine that the establishment of a cannery would inspire the development of a world-class destination like Los Cabos, but it's true. It's as difficult to believe that a place on earth as beautiful as Los Cabos would be relatively undiscovered just 100 years ago. But that's exactly how it was here on the Baja.

Archeological records indicate that the Baja was inhabited by tribes such as the Guaycura and Pericú as far back as 10,000 years. They relied on indigenous cactus and agave to complement their maritime lifestyle, using rafts with paddles to maneuver through the sea to catch fish. Tribal shamans practiced mystical cures, and their burial ceremonies were elaborate, according to archeological finds like the Las Palmas burial complex, where red ochre paint marks the sites of cave burials and rock shelters.

The Pericú didn't meet Europeans until late 1533 or early 1534, when Hernán Cortés, Spanish conqueror of Mexico, commissioned a sailing expedition that reached La Paz. A succession of European explorers — some privateers, others Manila galleons, missionaries and pearl hunters — followed. The Spanish treasure galleon Santa Ana was captured off Cabo San Lucas by Sir Thomas Cavendish in 1587, prompting King Phillip II of Spain to establish a small fortress there to rid the waters of pirates who used Cabo as a provisioning stop. In 1603, General Sebastián Vizcaíno launched three ships to travel up the now-California coastline, christening it Cabo San Lucas.

Missionaries, rather than conquistadors, introduced European civilization to San José del Cabo. The Jesuits established their first permanent mission north of Cabo San Lucas at Loreto in 1697 (at about the same time pearls were discovered in the Sea of Cortés). But relations with the Pericú were not all peaceful, and the Pericú revolted in 1734. However, European diseases such as measles and smallpox took their toll on the Indians, as did the uprisings against the Spanish. By 1767 the native Indians had virtually disappeared.

Oddly, it was an American cannery that launched Cabo San Lucas as a fishing village in 1927. At its peak, the Compañía de Productos Marinos was the largest cannery in Latin America, credited with producing 75 percent of Mexico's canned seafood products.

After World War II, Hollywood types like Bing Crosby and Desi Arnaz discovered Los Cabos as a vacation getaway. In fact, Crosby and John Wayne founded the region's first resort, at La Paz, in 1948. In the late 1950s, a decision critical to the future of Baja California was made by the federal government in Mexico City: Cabo San Lucas would cease to be a cannery town and would be developed as a major tourist destination. With rich fisheries, Los Cabos became popular with sportfishermen and eventually earned the nickname Marlin Alley. By 1958, the buzz in Cabo was about plans to construct a paved highway more than 1,000 miles long from the United States border to Cabo San Lucas. The amazing Transpeninsular Highway was completed simultaneously with the dredging of the marina harbor in 1973, and then the area began being serviced by a freshwater pipeline and an international airport in San José del Cabo.

Now Los Cabos is one of Mexico's most popular and best-served destinations, with visitors from all around the world flocking to discover its wondrous beauty, both above and below the surface of the glistening Sea of Cortés.

Land of Fame and Fortune

By Ken Rivadeneira

Los Cabos is well-known today as a luxury tourist destination, having some of the world's most highly regarded resorts and attracting a distinguished clientele that ranges from the Hollywood elite to captains of industry. Screen legends Bing Crosby and John Wayne turned this area from a sleepy fishing region into a world-class playground for the privileged. However, Crosby and Wayne were not the original VIPs of Los Cabos. Long before film and music stars made their way here for fun in the sun, this part of Baja California had already been a favorite among some big names in the world stage.

Back in the 16th and 17th centuries, privateers, corsairs and adventurers were the celebrities of their day — and everyone wanted to know what they were doing, what they were up to and where they were going. For a time, Los Cabos was the place to be. Maybe not so much for fun in the sun, although it's hard to believe that these soldiers of fortune wouldn't have appreciated the majestic views of El Arco at Land's End; but something did call them here — the treasure bounty that awaited.

The biggest name to come across here was the superstar of the Elizabethan Age, Sir Francis Drake himself. He sailed here on his famous Golden Hind in 1578 and visited San José del Cabo as he worked his way up the California coast. He even took a little time to plunder a couple of Spanish settlements, although he failed at striking it big and eventually moved on to greener pastures farther north.

Why was Los Cabos such a rich destination? The estuary of the Río San José was an important freshwater stop for galleons sailing along the Manila-Acapulco route. Depending on whether they were coming from or going to the Philippines, these massive Spanish vessels were heavily laden with valuable Asian spices, porcelain, ivory and lacquerware; from Mexico, the spoils were the massive amounts of silver mined from the mountains of Taxco.

Drake might not have had the greatest luck in Los Cabos, but another famous English privateer scored the jackpot of a lifetime right here off the coast of San Lucas. Sir Thomas Cavendish — another megastar of his day and fellow world circumnavigator of Drake — managed to capture one of these enormous Manila galleons on Nov. 14, 1587. The ransacking of the 700-ton Santa Ana was a major coup; in addition to silk, damask, pearls, satin, musk and wine, the vessel was saddled with more than 122,000 pesos in gold. At the time, this was the largest Spanish treasure to fall into English hands, and it made Cavendish an instant hero.

However, pirate booty was not the only treasure to be found in these waters. Among the prizes to be found in the Sea of Cortés, even to this day, are pearls. In 1594, Sebastián Vizcaíno, a Spanish soldier and diplomat, arrived at Bahía de La Paz to exploit the pearl beds there, famous for yielding unique black and pink pearls, and founded the colony of La Paz. Although pearls were found and the finding was reasonably profitable, the pearl industry was not enough to support an entire settlement and La Paz was abandoned. Still, Vizcaíno would remain in the area off-and-on for years to come, first as general of the Manila galleons and then as mayor of Acapulco.

After the English duo of Drake and Cavendish, Dutch privateer Joris van Spilbergen was the next big infamous troller to arrive in the Baja looking for some swag. Spilbergen managed to raid a few settlements, but overall did not succeed in hitting the mother lode, especially because he and his men were repelled by none other than Sebastián Vizcaíno. Nevertheless, Spilbergen would go on to make a name for himself as he, like Drake and Cavendish before him, also circumnavigated the globe.

Many more legendary names continued to come to Los Cabos, and it can be said that the region's still a magnet for people of that stripe. But just as the meaning of swag has changed from pirate booty to luxury gift bags, so has the vein of stardom. Whereas the celebrities of old captured galleons to obtain fame and fortune, our current visiting stars capture the hearts of people through film, music and art. But nothing and no one can capture hearts like the spectacular allure of Los Cabos.

Cabo History 1700s-Present

By Marlene Goldman

Missionaries, rather than conquistadors, introduced European civilization to San José del Cabo. The missionaries set up camp in 1730 to focus their efforts on the Pericú Indians of the region. But all was not peaceful between the missionaries and native inhabitants.

From 1734 to 1737, the Pericú and some Guaycura in the La Paz region and further south lashed out in rebellion against the missionaries, with four missions in particular as targets — San José at Cabo San Lucas, Nuestra Señora del Pilar at La Paz, Santa Rosa at Todos Santos and Santiago de las Coras.

There was one eyewitness, Father Sigismundo Taraval, a missionary at Todos Santos, at the time of the rebellion. As the story goes, the catalyst for the rebellion came when Father Nicolás Tamaral refused to let one of the wives of a Pericú shaman named Chicori return to him after her baptism. This strike against polygamy, which the native population practiced, set the stage for a violent uprising. Those killed included two soldiers, Father Lorenzo Carranco of Santiago and Tamaral of Cabo San Lucas. The Indians also burned the Santiago and San José del Cabo missions in 1734, and nearly captured the Manila galleon calling at Cabo San Lucas Mission in 1735. Taraval, meanwhile, fled to the mission at Los Dolores.

Tamaral's gory death by beheading is forever memorialized in a tile mural that hovers above the San José del Cabo Plaza's main cathedral.

However, European diseases such as measles and smallpox took their toll on the Indians, as did the uprisings against the Spanish. These two factors ultimately decimated the Guaycura and Pericú populations, and by 1767 the native Indians had virtually disappeared. By the end of the missionary period in 1767, the Indian population of the region plummeted by 80 percent to less than 8,000. Survivors were moved to missions farther north while the Spanish continued to use San José del Cabo as a vital military outpost until the mid-19th century, when Mexican nationals gained control of the presidio.

San José del Cabo gained importance once again when marines from the U.S. frigate Portsmouth occupied the city briefly during the Mexican-American War, which lasted from 1846 to 1848. The city's plaza, Plaza Mijares, is named after Mexican naval officer José Antonio Mijares, who led the Mexicans to victory after an intense battle.

The region lost its importance in the early 20th century as mining closed down and sugarcane cultivation — which had brought prosperity to the Los Cabos area in the 1920s and 1930s — slowly dried up. Los Cabos sat quietly for many years.

In that time, the area that is now Cabo San Lucas was nothing but a few farmhouses, cattle and a fish cannery. The 20-mile dirt road connecting the two towns was empty as well. By the 1930s, the town's population was only 400.

But military planes flying over the area in World War II caught sight of large schools of fish, and once the war ended, the area began to attract sportfishermen to its shores, eventually earning the name Marlin Alley. At that time there were still no roads to Los Cabos — only private planes and wealthy yachtsmen had access to the sublime beauty of the area.

As more people began to explore the area, the word of its attractions seeped out. Not only were there big fish to be caught, but Los Cabos was also a breeding ground for gray whales, a nesting area for giant turtles and a sanctuary for more than 800 species of marine life.

These ecological riches, plus the 3,000-mile coastline surrounding both the Pacific and the Sea of Cortés — which, if straightened, would span from Tijuana to Juneau, Alaska — have helped turn former backwater Los Cabos into a mecca for mass tourism.