32 DEPARTURES TRAVEL GETTING WARMER Beachside at Montage Los Cabos resorts are less fantasy hacienda and more urbane and sophisticated. I arrived in Los Cabos reluctantly, being neither a stop-and-flop resortgoer nor a nightfly. I came at a time when the region tops many national lists: the most expensive city, the fastest-growing population and an unprecedented number of resorts in the works. Everywhere I went that wasn’t behind a resort wall there were cranes, rebar and private buses shuttling hotel workers. But even more overwhelming was the aweinspiring topography and stunning weather that keeps visitors coming: swaths of the bluest sky and wide beaches extending for kilometres in both directions. Turn inland and there’s the desert, all gradations of red, umber, taupe and grey. Look seaward and the ocean is midnight blue or blue-green, and unforgiving in its rip currents. It’s gorgeous and thrilling, and locals well know that Cabo can give and take away. “Whenever you talk about the evolution of Los Cabos, you need to talk about the hurricanes,” said Martin Kipping, general manager of Viceroy (viceroyhotelsandresorts.com). In 2014, Hurricane Odile devastated the region, leaving billion in damage and taking legendary enclaves like One&Only Palmilla down to the studs. “It gave Los Cabos a chance to reconsider what it should be.” To experience the latest grand opening, I checked in to Montage Los Cabos ( montagehotels.com), the first international property from the ultrapremium US-based hotel group. The resort’s low-slung buildings of stacked stone and simple timber are minimalist and oriented towards three levels of pool leading down toward a dramatic reveal of the beach, as romantic as any I’ve seen. This could be Puglia, except the music of Mexican songstress Natalia Lafourcade was playing on the sound system at the beachside restaurant Marea, where there was smoked dashi on the yellowtail and chevronpatterned tiling on the floor. Along with details like these, the resort manages to hit all the notes of a highest-common denominator Mexican holiday, and I quickly fell into a pattern: a walk to the beach for a bracing ocean swim; pre-lunch massage to work out the kinks of urban life; local fish at the midday meal; a fresh fruit paleta (popsicle) before a dip in the pool. Before midsize resorts started to scale Mexican modernism in Los Cabos, there were, as there often are, smaller pioneers who proved the theory. To experience the first movers, I wandered into San José del Cabo to visit Drift San José (drift sanjose.com), the first “cool” hotel to open in town, I was told. There, under the shade of palm trees and a rough timber pergola in a gravel courtyard, I lounged around next to a plunge pool surrounded by simple rooms with glass-and-steel doors. Vintage disco played on the sound system. Fortified, I ambled through the arts district as the sun dropped, the heat broke, and the town came to life. Young and old couples danced on the square. Families who’d ventured offresort wearing pastel polos, driving mocs and pressed khaki shorts took
photos in front of the little cathedral. This wasn’t the Cabo of yore that cosseted the Brads and Jennifers, or that of the party-hearty Sammy Hagars and Charlie Sheens. It is, dare I say, for the discerning international traveller who enjoys his culture as much as his cabana. Outside town, nature is surprisingly untamed. One morning I took a taxi to the northeast of San José del Cabo, where, at first, the highway was so smooth and manicured it could have been a planned development outside Scottsdale. Then, in an instant, the road turned to dirt, freshly rutted by a recent storm, and there, atop a hill, was a streak of verdant jungle fed by aquifers from the Sierra de la Laguna. In this oasis of palm trees and gardens was Acre ( acrebaja.com), a collection of bungalows and treehouses set discreetly behind birds-of-paradise and cacti along meandering paths. An integral part of the mature Cabo resort-building boom is private ownership of holiday homes with price tags in the low millions of dollars and the same dazzling desert and sea views. They were at the Montage and Chileno Bay and the Viceroy, as well as the yet-to-becompleted Nobus and Four Seasons. Left: the beach at The Cape, a Thompson Hotel; below: a hammock tower at Drift San José And now even an independent like Acre is expanding, with a collection of fractional-ownership bungalows under construction. The closest I allowed myself to get to Cabo San Lucas proper was The Cape, a Thompson Hotel (thompsonhotels. com), one of the first modernist resorts in the region. The building is cut into a breaktaking beach three miles from town, its mezzanine offering a cinematic view of the El Arco rock formation in the distance. At the hotel’s Manta restaurant I ate roasted sweet potato alongside what might be the best tortilla and mole I’ve had since a recent trip to Mexico City – as it should be: the restaurant is overseen by Enrique Olvera, the celebrity chef behind the city’s renowned Pujol. On my final night, at Chileno Bay (aubergeresorts.com), another recently opened property, I saw much of what I’d experienced at Montage: cascading infinity pools. The smell of pineapple sizzling on the rotisserie wafts up from the taco restaurant. (Serving street food of the DF is definitely a Cabo trend.) I had yet another world-class meal – plantain and masa tortillas with cochinita pibil – at Comal, Chileno Bay’s restaurant. To the east, another recently unveiled resort, the Luxury Collection’s marble-andwood Solaz, glowed in the setting sun, with hundreds of kilometres of unspoiled coastline still looming behind it. In 1951 John Steinbeck, one of the first writers to chronicle a trip to Baja, wrote The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Flush from the success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck spent six weeks cataloguing the tide pools and crustaceans up and down the peninsula long before the first grand hotel was constructed. “Let us go into the Sea of Cortez,” Steinbeck wrote as he embarked on his journey, wise enough to know that travel and curiosity in some way always alter the course of a place. Like a hurricane. Or a hotel. “We shall take something away from it,” he wrote, “but we shall leave something too.” DEPARTURES 33
