What Is Los Cabos Known For? Golf, Marlin and the Arch

The Cabo San Lucas marina at half past five in the morning is all diesel and ice. The boats are loading, the deckhands are stacking bait, and the people going out on them have been talking about this day for months. By nine they will be four miles offshore with a line in the water and nothing on either side but the Pacific on one hand and the Sea of Cortés on the other.

That is what Los Cabos is known for. Everything else here grew around the fishing and the golf.

Golf, by the names that exist

Eighteen courses are open for play at the southern tip of Baja, which is a strange number for a desert the size of a county, and they are the reason a large share of our Cabo guests come at all.

The ones worth knowing by name: Cabo del Sol, whose Ocean course opened in 1994 with seven holes on the coastline, and whose Desert course was Tom Weiskopf's first design in Mexico. Quivira, Jack Nicklaus, 2014, with more oceanfront exposure than anything else here and a fifth tee more than 275 feet above the surf. Diamante — the Dunes course, and El Cardonal, which was Tiger Woods's first completed design. Palmilla, the first Nicklaus Signature course in Latin America, where the Ocean nine drops 600 feet from the first tee to the sixth green. Puerto Los Cabos, twenty-seven holes, an eighteen by Nicklaus and a nine by Greg Norman. Cabo Real, by Robert Trent Jones Jr., which held two PGA Senior Slam events in the nineties. El Dorado, Querencia and Chileno Bay sit on the same board's ranking and are club courses; ask us before you plan a round on one, because the answer depends on the house.

The tournament that moves the calendar is the WWT Championship in November. If you want the courses quiet, do not come that week. We have written separately about where to play and what each one costs you in balls.

Marlin, and what runs when

Los Cabos sits where the Pacific and the Sea of Cortés come together, and that meeting is the whole reason for the fishing. Blue marlin, striped marlin, dorado and roosterfish are the four the tourism board names, and the honest answer on seasons is that it is a year-round fishery and the best month for any one species is a question for the captain, not for a web page. The board itself declines to publish a calendar.

What does have dates: the Bisbee's Black and Blue and the Los Cabos Billfish Tournament, both in October. In those two weeks the marina is a different place and the hotels are full of people who are not here for the beach.

If you are chartering and you have children with you, ask for a half day rather than a full one. Four hours out there is an adventure. Eight is a test.

El Arco, and the two seas

The arch at Land's End is the photograph, and it earns it. Granite, sea on both sides, boats idling underneath it, and a short run from the marina — the same marina the fishing fleet leaves from, which is why the harbour at eight in the morning is both a commercial port and a sightseeing queue.

Go early. The light is better and the water is flatter. If your group has no boat of its own, the arch and Lover's Beach run with a snorkel stop is the one with the most reviews behind it by a distance, and the one we would book.

Which beaches you can actually swim at

This is where Cabo needs a straight answer, because much of this coastline is not for swimming and the brochures do not say so.

The Los Cabos Tourism Board's Blue Flag list is the useful document. Five beaches it names as swimmable: Chileno and Santa María on the Corridor, Palmilla nearest San José del Cabo, El Médano in Cabo San Lucas itself, and Acapulquito, which is really a learners' surf beach. Every single one is on the Sea of Cortés side.

Chileno is the one to send snorkellers to. El Médano is the one with the beach clubs and the one you can walk to from town. Santa María is a cove and gets busy by eleven.

The Pacific side is for walking. It is a magnificent walk — long, empty, loud — and you keep your feet dry.

When we tell families to go somewhere else

If you are bringing children under about eight and the point of the week is that they live in the water, Cabo is the wrong coast and we will say so on the phone. The swimmable beaches are real but they are a drive from most of the houses, and a week spent calling a four-year-old out of the surf is not a holiday for anybody.

For that trip we send people to Puerto Vallarta, where the bay is calm and the town is walkable, or to the Riviera Maya, where the water is flat and warm. Cabo is for golfers, for fishermen, for groups who want the desert and the big evenings, and for anybody whose children can swim properly.

Cabo Pulmo, and Todos Santos

Two drives worth the day.

Cabo Pulmo is up the East Cape, and it is the only coral reef ecosystem in the Gulf of California. CONANP made it a protected area in 1995, after a fishing village that lived entirely off the water voted to stop fishing it and go into guiding instead. Commercial fishing is prohibited by the decree; sport fishing is permitted only catch-and-release. Three decades on, the reef is what people fly in to dive. It is, as far as we know, the best thing anyone on this coast has ever done.

Todos Santos is up the Pacific coast the other way: a Pueblo Mágico of galleries, a sandy main street and a surf beach, and a different century from the marina.

Where to stay

The honest shape of a Cabo week is a house on the Corridor or at Palmilla, a car, two rounds, one day on the water and one day doing nothing. Start with Los Cabos and tell us which of those four you care about most.