This article originally published in Hakai Magazine.
The fish are so thick we can see them from the boat, a writhing mass darkening the ocean’s surface, their oily smell rising into the air. Our guide counts us down—“uno, dos, tres!”—and we slip overboard. Within moments, a thousand or more bigeye jack surround us. Each jack is as unremarkable as a child’s drawing of a fish: bullet-shaped, a half-meter long, relatively common in the tropics. Together, they’re breathtaking.
I lift my face from the water and get my bearings: a sea that seems made of light, the tawny mountains of the Mexican state of Baja California Sur rising in the distance. A few snorkels poke up around me. “Chicos, over here!” our guide calls. “Tortuga!” I reach her just in time to see a hawksbill turtle drift by. Later, we’ll glimpse several more sea turtles, along with a spotted eagle ray, a green moray eel, parrotfish, pufferfish, and angelfish. The reef below, as John Steinbeck wrote in The Log from the Sea of Cortez, “skittered and pulsed with life.”
The biodiversity packed into this sliver of ocean is partially a result of underwater geology and currents that allowed the only true coral reef in the Sea of Cortez (also called the Gulf of California) to form here some 20,000 years ago. Equally important, however, is a nearby village called Cabo Pulmo. In the 1980s, fishermen began noticing a decline in fish and other marine life. Corals were increasingly damaged by anchors. Then the village’s story took a surprising turn: residents decided to stop fishing the reef and focus on conservation and ecotourism.
Kids play soccer on the main drag of Cabo Pulmo, in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur. The village has no pavement or traffic lights and is powered largely by rooftop solar.
In 1995, the Mexican government designated 71 square kilometers of ocean as a national marine park. Locals helped implement and enforce a fishing ban within the park’s boundaries, and they educated visitors on responsible diving and snorkeling. By 2009, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego found that fish biomass had jumped 463 percent—the largest increase ever documented in a marine reserve. The biomass of top predators like sharks increased tenfold.
The village, which now has 300 residents, has its own elementary and middle school, locally owned restaurants, dive outfitters, and guest houses for rent. Cabo Pulmo remains charmingly rustic with no hotels, and electricity comes largely from rooftop solar. The village and its eponymous park are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
“This is a perfect example of what a community that belongs to a place can do,” says Judith Castro Lucero, who grew up in Cabo Pulmo. “Because we belong to this ocean.”
For a long time, Cabo Pulmo’s location also aided its success. The Cabo del Este—or East Cape—region surrounding the park is a quiet stretch of desert and sea. Yet, the East Cape is beginning to change, and rapidly. Real estate speculation; megaresorts; and unplanned, poorly planned, and possibly illegally planned developments threaten to displace people and harm biodiversity—potentially even in the waters that Cabo Pulmo has fought so hard to protect. As local activists try to rein in the worst projects, they’re confronting competing visions for the region’s future.
Judith Castro Lucero’s family was instrumental in creating Cabo Pulmo National Park.
The 1,200-kilometer-long peninsula of Baja California juts south from the US state of California like a crooked finger. Geographically, culturally, and even geologically, it is distinct from mainland Mexico. Baja California Sur is especially dry and sparsely populated, claiming both the longest coastline and the least fresh water of any Mexican state. The isolation began to erode in the 1970s when the Mexican government decided to boost the economies of the nation’s poorest states by turning a handful of communities into seaside tourism hubs. One of them was Los Cabos, roughly 100 kilometers south of Cabo Pulmo.
With help from the World Bank, the government improved roads, built an international airport, and offered incentives for real estate developers. Mass-market hotels, luxury hotels, second homes, marinas, and golf courses followed. In 2022, over three million visitors came to Los Cabos, and many never left their all-inclusive resorts.
Yet the rebranding of Los Cabos from a fishing and agricultural community into a glitzy resort destination came at a cost. Because some construction interfered with the flow of water from the mountains, aquifers and certain beaches shrank, and fewer nutrients reached the sea. Hotels effectively walled off much of Los Cabos’ 32-kilometer coastline. Tourism workers, meanwhile, settled in cordones de miseria (“belts of misery”) on the city’s outskirts, where they frequently live without running water. In 2006, 15 percent of local households lacked potable water, while hotels watered lawns and flushed toilets with abandon. Ecosystems suffered too. As of 2022, Los Cabos had the lowest recorded fish biomass out of 76 sites across Baja Sur.
Until recently, this sort of unchecked development was largely constrained to Los Cabos. Driving north toward Cabo Pulmo and beyond, the East Cape has maintained an almost mythological reputation. Bone-rattling roads keep crowds at bay, and the region’s 20,000 or so residents can still spend weekends picnicking, swimming, fishing, and camping freely on beaches that stretch unbroken for miles.
Or at least they could, until Los Cabos–style development began creeping north.
El Caribe is a neighborhood just outside the tourist district Los Cabos where many tourism workers live.
Reina Macklis is waiting for me in her battered gold Subaru in a mostly dry arroyo just outside La Ribera, the town closest to Cabo Pulmo. I follow Macklis as far down the arroyo as I can in my rental car, then park next to some Mexican fishermen who say they’ve come here from Los Cabos because their own waters are too polluted to fish. Macklis—an environmental activist who grew up in La Ribera—says this happens often, and she fears similar pollution may soon taint her hometown waters. A Los Angeles–based investment firm called Irongate is in the midst of building a megadevelopment known as Costa Palmas between La Ribera and the arroyo.
When it’s complete, Costa Palmas will look more like a small, exclusive city than a resort. It will include two luxury hotels and nearly 400 private homes, priced from US $2.5-million to $26-million. According to the New York Times, it will also boast “polo fields, a horseback riding center, several organic farms, a kids club, and scenic walking paths,” as well as 20 restaurants, a golf course, a pool, a gym, a movie theater, and a 250-yacht marina with an exclusive club. It will span three kilometers of beach.
On this warm, overcast morning, Macklis has agreed to show me and photographer Kristina Blanchflower how Costa Palmas is already affecting local people and ecosystems. She starts by pointing out a 5.7-kilometer-long stone wall several meters high that construction workers are building alongside the arroyo. Typically, when the arroyo floods, the water disperses into an estuary of Mexican fan palms, mangroves, and wetlands. But because the flooding arroyo would put the golf courses and buildings of Costa Palmas at risk, the wall is being built to channel water away from them.
Unfortunately, a concentrated flood passes through more quickly than a dispersed one, which keeps it from percolating into the aquifer that supplies La Ribera’s drinking water. Costa Palmas draws from the same limited aquifer, and since parts of the resort opened, Macklis says she and other La Ribera residents have run out of water—sometimes for a few days, once for two weeks. A single golf course, meanwhile, uses enough water every day to supply 9,000 Baja residents.
And Costa Palmas is far from the only new golf course in the East Cape. As of 2022, state and municipal governments had approved permits for nine additional golf courses, with 18 more under consideration. They’d approved nearly 12,500 hotel rooms, with another 25,000 in the permitting process, and 10,000 new houses, with 20,300 more in permitting.
Thanks largely to such development, the population of the East Cape nearly doubled between 2010 and 2020—from 13,800 to 21,000 people—and is expected to surpass 138,000 by 2040. While many of the new residents are construction and tourism workers from other parts of Mexico, the population boom is also driven by second-home owners, investors, digital nomads, and retirees from the United States, Canada, and Europe who put additional pressure on the region’s scant fresh water.
Walking from the arroyo toward the beach, Macklis points out raccoon and bird tracks in the sand. Leatherback and ridley sea turtles, as well as the endangered gallito marino, or least tern, nest here. A great blue heron stands in the shallows, and a flock of migratory ducks rests nearby. The area is also home to the endangered Belding’s yellowthroat, a bright warbler that lives only in the wetlands of Baja California Sur.
And then, abruptly, the wetlands end in a massive construction zone crawling with cranes and bulldozers and men in hard hats. “All that over there was mangroves,” Macklis says. “And they took it all out.”
Satellite images confirm that the verdant wetlands around the mouth of the arroyo shrank drastically as construction of Costa Palmas began. The beach accessible to La Ribera residents also shrank as Costa Palmas’ marina cut off the flow of sediment from the arroyo.
Costa Palmas has changed the area’s social fabric as well. Macklis remembers when La Ribera was a peaceful town, just a bit bigger than neighboring Cabo Pulmo. Now, there are so many newcomers that the school has turned away students. The line for the medical clinic wraps around the building. It’s more dangerous to walk after dark. And Macklis no longer comes to the beach alone. When we get to the edge of the construction zone, where a uniformed man with a walkie-talkie stands guard, she stops.
“I used to come to the beach a lot,” she says. “But not as much now … To come by myself is dangerous. It’s dangerous for me because they know me.”
What she means is that they know she’s tried to document the destruction this project has caused. What she means is that she’s afraid to come to her hometown beach. What she means is that she’s being pushed out.
Blanchflower and I, however, are gringas, and no one is going to stop us from continuing on. So while Macklis returns to her salt-rusted Subaru, Blanchflower and I stroll past the security guard, past the expensive homes in various stages of construction, past the golf course where men in pastel-colored polos cluster on immaculate grass. We walk right into the Four Seasons hotel. Everything is white canvas and rattan and clean, modern lines: the infinity pool, the xeriscaping, the beachside restaurant with bouquets on each table. We see an open-air yoga class, where a flock of slender white women stretch and chatter like birds. We stop at an empty bar to chat with the bartender, who lives in Los Cabos but commutes here five days a week because the pay is better and he’s saving for a house. He tells us this as if it’s part of his job, and his deference makes me uncomfortable. Even though we’re sweaty and bedraggled, people seem to think we’ve spent between roughly $1,500 and $4,000 per night to stay here, simply because we’re white.
Meanwhile Macklis is driving to her home that occasionally runs out of water, hoping to get some rest before she shows up for her shift at a shelter for street dogs. She works there because she loves animals, loves this place, and wants only to ensure that it stays habitable for everyone—dogs and humans and birds alike.
Driving back to the small guesthouse we’re renting in Cabo Pulmo, we pass roads that, according to my 2021 atlas, show beach access but which the Costa Palmas development now blocks. We pass belching construction trucks full of rocks and cement. The way quiets as we head south, until finally we’re back on the washboarded road to Cabo Pulmo. My shoulders relax, and I roll down the windows to let in the velvet air.
A hurricane passed over the East Cape two weeks ago, and the desert flushes green from rain. Paloverde and acacia trees intertwine with flowering shrubs and all kinds of cacti. The biggest are elephant cacti, or Mexican giant cardón, which soar more than 19 meters into the air. Vultures scan for food from their upper limbs. Roadrunners dart in front of our car.
Still, even on this quiet dirt road, there are signs of encroaching development. Literally. Every few kilometers, we see another large Se Vende sign. Or, if the landowner is targeting expats, For Sale. If these lots are sold, second homes and hotels could soon surround Cabo Pulmo just as they do La Ribera. During my November visit, developers just a few kilometers away are even clearing land for another proposed megadevelopment similar to Costa Palmas, this one directly abutting Cabo Pulmo National Park.
“Pulmo is an excellent example of how conservation can be very successful,” says Armando Trasviña Castro, an oceanographer at the Ensenada Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education. “But it’s so small, and it’s surrounded by areas that are experiencing very accelerated growth. And that has an impact on what happens inside the protected area.”
Studies indeed show that nutrients entering the ocean from La Ribera’s arroyo, 30 kilometers away, help feed the marine life in Cabo Pulmo’s reef. What happens on land affects what happens in the sea. “The whole environment is connected,” says Sarahí Gómez Villada, a marine biologist with the nonprofit Mexican Center for Environmental Law. If the coast around Cabo Pulmo is transformed into a parade of second homes or a big resort, marine and terrestrial life within the park will likely suffer.
Angeles Castro sits in the Cabo Pulmo restaurant she owns with her family.
That evening, I meet Angeles Castro for fresh scallops at an open-air, oceanfront restaurant she owns with her family in Cabo Pulmo. Angeles is Judith Castro Lucero’s cousin; their grandfather helped settle the village. When the cousins were growing up in the 1980s, the kids weren’t allowed to swim unless the beach was clean, like children elsewhere aren’t allowed to watch TV until they tidy their rooms.
Now, I ask Angeles about the For Sale signs we saw earlier. “Our East Cape has been sold, sadly, most of it,” she says. “It used to be ranches here and there, and then just empty land.” She shakes her head. “Why more marinas? Why more hotels? There’s so many in [Los Cabos] already, and look what happens. [Tourists there] go diving and don’t see what they see here because there is not much fish over there. The whole pull is to come see the natural beauty, but if they’re ruining the natural beauty, there’s nothing left to see. There’s just going to be their fancy hotel.”
Angeles worries that developments around Cabo Pulmo could also push her own family away. Beaches in Mexico cannot be privately owned, but there are ways to kick people out. Beach access can be closed or monetized. Real estate prices can rise so
Original Story at www.sierraclub.org