THIS IS BAJA

san josé del cabo

The Jesuits built a mission here in 1730, at the one place on this coast where a river reaches the sea. Everything since has arranged itself around that fact.

Fresh water sits close to the surface in the San José valley — rare on this peninsula — and for generations it grew sugar cane, mangoes and citrus for everyone south of here. The farms are still working. The estuary where the river meets the sea holds more bird species than most of the state.

The old town kept its shape. A plaza, a church on it, streets of low colour, and galleries that open together on Thursday evenings. People still walk it.

baja california sur

A thousand kilometres of desert with a sea on either side. Until the highway came through in 1973, most of it was reached by boat, by plane, or by a week of dirt road — which is why the culture here grew its own way and kept it.

The Sierra de la Laguna rises behind the coast and carries pine and oak at altitude: a forest standing in a desert, held as a biosphere reserve. Below it, cardón and palo blanco, arroyos that run a few days a year, and ranches that have worked the same country for three centuries on horseback.

Baja California Sur has been a state since 1974. It has been itself for considerably longer.

EL MAR DE CORTÉS

Cousteau called it the aquarium of the world and the name has held. The Gulf of California carries close to nine hundred fish species and a third of the planet’s marine mammals, and UNESCO lists it as World Heritage.

An hour up the coast sits Cabo Pulmo, one of the oldest coral reefs in the Americas. In 1995 the fishing families who lived off it asked for it to be closed, and they held the line themselves. Within a decade the fish had returned severalfold — the most complete marine recovery on record.

The desert and the sea meet along this coast, and they have always been cooked together. Everything on the table at Suelo Sur comes from one or the other.