Five Romantic Ways to Propose in Los Cabos

The desert goes orange about forty minutes before the sun actually sets, and the light on this peninsula at that hour does something no photograph has ever quite carried. Granite, cactus, a very large sky, and the sea going from blue to pewter.

That is the thing Los Cabos does best, and it is free, and almost nobody plans around it.

Here are five ways to do this that exist, with what each one actually needs.

One. El Arco, early

The arch at Land's End is the photograph and it earns it: granite, sea on both sides, boats idling underneath, and a short run from the marina.

Two conditions. Go early — the light is better and the water is flatter, and the same harbour the sightseeing boats leave from is a working sportfishing fleet at eight in the morning, which is its own thing to watch. And accept that you will not be alone out there.

What we are not going to tell you is how old it is or how it formed, because no official source we read states a figure.

If the trip falls between December and April, the same boat is also whale season — the Los Cabos Tourism Board gives those months for gray and humpback whales — and a proposal with a humpback somewhere off the rail is a difficult thing to improve on. What Los Cabos is known for goes through the rest of it.

Two. A beach you are allowed to swim at

This is where Los Cabos needs a straight answer that the brochures do not give.

Much of this coastline is for walking rather than swimming. The Los Cabos Tourism Board's Blue Flag list names five swimmable beaches — Chileno, Santa María, Palmilla, El Médano and Acapulquito — and every one of them is on the Sea of Cortés side. A proposal that ends with somebody being knocked flat by the Pacific is not the memory you had in mind.

So pick from the five, and pick the house to match. Casa Mañana at Palmilla Norte has private access to one of them. Villa Esperanza on the Corridor describes itself, accurately, as a short stroll from one of the few swimmable beaches in Los Cabos. Villa Marena opens straight onto Médano.

And Casa Bellamar at Playa Tortuga has the version where you do not leave: an oceanfront level with a heated pool, palapas and a swim-up bar, and the sand below it.

The hour is seven in the morning, before anybody else is on it. It is the only time these beaches are empty, and it is also the only time the sea is flat.

Three. A boat, and the thing that is not the Arch

If the group has a boat day in it anyway, there is a more interesting version than the arch run.

Cabo Pulmo is up the coast on the Sea of Cortés and it is the real natural story of this peninsula. CONANP has protected it since 1995 and made it a national park in 2000 — about seven thousand hectares, ninety-nine per cent of it sea, a Ramsar wetland and a World Heritage property, and the only coral reef ecosystem in the Gulf of California. Sport fishing there is permitted only as catch and release.

It is a long way, it needs a day, and it is not where you go to set up a photograph. It is where you go if the person you are asking would rather be somewhere that matters than somewhere that photographs.

Four. The desert, which is the other half of Cabo

Everybody arrives thinking Los Cabos is a beach and leaves remembering the land behind it: cardón cactus, granite, and a sky that goes the colour of a peach for about twenty minutes.

You do not need a destination for this one. You need a car, an hour before sunset, and somewhere to pull off and stop. The Pedregal hillside above Cabo San Lucas has it on the doorstep — Casa Finisterra sits up there with the terrace open to the Pacific and nothing at eye level in any direction.

The reason this works is that it is the only one of the five with no audience at all.

Five. The terrace of the house you are in

And then the one that keeps winning.

A staffed house has a chef already in the kitchen, a house manager who knows where flowers come from at eight in the morning, and a terrace that is yours until Saturday. Dinner happens the way dinner was going to happen; the plates go; the rest of the party conveniently decides to look at something.

One thing to check before you book rather than after: only four of our thirty-nine Los Cabos houses include the chef in the rate. On the other thirty-five the chef is a line on the quote. That is how this coast prices a house — not a criticism, just a number worth knowing when the plan depends on somebody being in the kitchen on Thursday.

The order to do it in

Plan one of the first four and keep the fifth in your pocket, because the first four all need somebody else's cooperation — a captain, a tide, a month, a sunset — and the fifth needs an hour.

And if what you actually want is a boat to yourselves, a garden and a town to walk into afterwards, read propose in Puerto Vallarta before you book anything. The two coasts are good at different evenings, and we would rather say so than sell you this one.

Start with our houses in Los Cabos — and if a club day is part of the week, the Los Cabos beach clubs our houses open is the list of doors that actually open.