The only hard coral reef in the Gulf of California and one of the oldest in the Eastern Pacific, sixty kilometres north of San José del Cabo on the East Cape. The national marine park has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1995, and protects a series of granite ridges and coral fingers running out from a village of a few dozen people.
The recovery is the story. By the early 1990s the reef had been fished to near-silence. In 1995 the fishing families who lived here voted to stop fishing it altogether — their own livelihood — and policed the decision themselves. Within a decade fish biomass had risen by 460 per cent, the largest documented recovery of a coral reef ecosystem anywhere in the world. Marine biologists cite Cabo Pulmo whenever they need to show that reserves work.
What that means in the water is schools of thousands of bigeye jacks that form a tornado you can swim into, bull sharks, giant grouper, mantas, turtles and, in season, whale sharks. Diving and snorkelling here are as good as Mexico offers.
The village has no bank, no petrol station and intermittent mains power; most of it runs on solar. The road in from the north is paved to La Ribera and then unsealed — manageable in an ordinary car in dry weather, not after rain. Day trips from San José del Cabo take about ninety minutes each way, but staying the night is better: the day boats arrive mid-morning and the first dive of the day is the quiet one.
Boat trips into the park are run by a handful of small operators in the village, all of them required to hold a national park permit. Numbers at each dive site are capped, and the mooring buoys exist so that nobody drops an anchor on the coral.