Baja California Peninsula
Discover Baja California Peninsula
Introduction
Baja California is a peninsula twelve hundred kilometres long and rarely more than a hundred and fifty wide, with the Pacific on one side and the Sea of Cortez on the other — the gulf Steinbeck sailed and Jacques Cousteau called the world’s aquarium. Between them runs a spine of desert mountains, and the combination of desert and sea is the whole character of the place.
Cabo San Lucas, at the southern tip where the two bodies of water meet, is the resort end of it, with the rock arch at Land’s End and sport fishing that draws boats from across the Pacific. Further up the gulf, the capital of Baja California Sur is quieter, and the boats to Espiritu Santo island and to swim with whale sharks leave from there. In the north, the Valle de Guadalupe behind Ensenada has become Mexico’s serious wine region in the space of about twenty years.
The wildlife is the peninsula’s real distinction. Grey whales swim from the Arctic to calve in the shallow Pacific lagoons at San Ignacio and Magdalena between January and March, and the boats there get closer to whales than almost anywhere on earth. Inland, the Sierra de San Francisco holds hundreds of rock painting sites, some panels several metres high, made by people whose descendants were gone before anyone could ask about them; they are UNESCO-listed.