Punta Mita vs Cabo: Who Is Cooking, and Who Is Swimming

The question arrives in the same shape every time: Punta Mita or Cabo. And the detail that settles it usually comes in the next breath — there are fourteen of us and four of them are under seven.

That is the whole comparison. It is not about which coast is better. It is about who is coming, and whether somebody is cooking.

The numbers from our own listings

Everything below is our own data, so you can hold it against the brochures.

Read the second row twice. In Punta Mita the chef comes with the house on three in five of them. In Los Cabos he comes with the house on one in ten, and on the other nine he is a line on the quote.

That is not a criticism of Cabo. It is how that coast prices a house, and knowing it in advance is the difference between a budget and a surprise.

Punta Mita: a gate, two courses, and quiet on purpose

Punta Mita is a 1,500-acre gated resort community on a peninsula at the north end of Banderas Bay, with nine and a half miles of Pacific coast and two Jack Nicklaus Signature courses inside the gate. The Riviera Nayarit board describes the Pacífico course, opened in 1999, and its one famous hole — a green on a natural island 199 yards off the tee, which everybody calls the whale's tale.

Outside the gate there are seven breaks round the peninsula and, a short crossing offshore, the Marietas — a national park you reach only by boat and only with a permitted operator.

What there is not, and this is the point rather than the problem, is nightlife. The peninsula is quiet by design. The evening happens at your own table, or at a beach club. People who want to be left alone come here precisely for that.

Los Cabos: desert, golf and marlin

Cabo is the other thing entirely: desert running into sea at the tip of Baja, big skies, and a town at the end of it. It is a getaway for golfers and for deep-sea fishing, and on both counts it is as good as its reputation — what Los Cabos is known for goes through it properly.

It is also where the evening exists. If half the group wants dinner somewhere with a view and a room after it, Cabo gives you that in a way this peninsula simply does not.

And then the honest part, which we say to everybody: the ocean beaches at Los Cabos are rough. Not all of them, and the swimmable ones are lovely, but the default beach in Cabo is for walking and photographing rather than for swimming. With small children that matters more than anything else on this page.

The number that actually decides it

Fourteen people, four of them under seven, means three meals a day for fourteen people for seven days. That is ninety-eight meals. Nobody's holiday survives that unless somebody else is cooking.

So that group goes to Punta Mita, into a house where the chef in the rate means breakfast when the children wake rather than when the kitchen opens.

The same group with no children, all adults, all golfers, in February — that is Cabo, and we would say so.

Who each one is for

Punta Mita if: there are children; there is a group of more than twelve; somebody surfs; you want the week to be looked after and otherwise undisturbed; you would rather eat at your own long table than book anywhere.

Los Cabos if: the party is adults; golf is the spine of the week; somebody wants marlin; you want a town in the evening; and nobody needs to swim off the beach in front of the house.

Both if neither — in which case take Punta Mita first, because it is the easier week, and keep Cabo for the trip after.

Two houses, to make it concrete

Casa Koko inside the Punta Mita gates: ten bedrooms, twenty-two people, a house manager and concierge for ten hours a day, butler service, and a professional chef with a sous-chef and a kitchen assistant from nine until nine. It is the whole argument in one listing.

Casa Brooks on the Los Cabos golf corridor is the Cabo version: the golf out of the door, the desert light, and the chef as a line on the quote rather than part of the rate — which, again, is simply how that coast works.

Getting there

Punta Mita is 45 to 60 minutes from Puerto Vallarta airport, and that is the figure our own transfer page uses. Los Cabos is a different flight to a different sea, across the mouth of the Gulf of California. They are not a two-centre holiday; pick one.

Start with our fully staffed houses in Punta Mita, and if the answer is actually Cabo, tell Rocío and she will say so.