Cabo means very different things to different people these days: spring-breakers sucking down tequila Jell-O shots in El Squid Roe and the Gigglin Marlin. Wet T-shirt contests without the T-shirts. McDonald's, Häagen-Dazs, Costco. Hotels walling off the beach while sewage trickles into a crowded harbor. Golfers seriously paying to play in parched air, on unnaturally green signature courses. Gated communities with shotgun-slung guards and personal infinity pools. George Clooney and Gwyneth Paltrow in secluded über-resorts. Forests of rebar and embryonic condos swarming with laborers trucked in from poorest mainland Mexico—people who sleep in remote canyons without running water or services. Sun, fun, beauty, fame, oblivion, squalor: "Cabo."
On one side of the 20-mile development corridor is Cabo San Lucas, and at the other San José del Cabo and the so-called cape region, all of it ringing with the sounds of hammers and snorting diesels. A parallel American vacation dream is rapidly being created down here that's transforming one of the world's most remarkable maritime landscapes and raising questions about environmental damage.
"What environmental damage?" asks Johnny Vaughn, a partner in Grupo Questro, one of Cabo's big, multinational developers. We're tooling around Cabo San Lucas in his SUV to get some perspective on the real estate boom. "If somebody can show me how we're hurting the environment, I wish they would."
Many have tried, but that's another story. Plump and affable, Vaughn smokes a cigarette as he totes up the usual Cabo superlatives: fastest-growing resort community in Mexico; most expensive annual boat race; biggest charity events. He points to a lot facing the harbor, where a museum commemorating Mexico's culture and 1910 revolution is to be built. "This is the last open space on the waterfront. The museum's going to be a huge, beautiful monster." "Huge" is the adjective of choice here. "Look at those houses," he says, pointing to the stone palaces balanced on the ridge between the Sea of Cortés and the Pacific Ocean, in a literally over-the-top development called Pedregal. "They're huge." The biggest belongs—naturally—to the developer who put together this particular collection of conspicuous views. "They all belong to Californians, Arizonans, and Texans."
No one is on the cobbled streets other than maids waiting for the Pedregal bus. Vaughn grew up in Sonora, far to the north, and I ask him why all the projects here are built by outsiders. "The locals aren't very good at managing things," Vaughn says. "A lot of them are descended from pirates, you know." And ranchers along the coast never paid much attention to the sea, "until we discovered it."
"We" is Cabo's tight, seemingly autonomous, catalytic real estate community. The population of Cabo San Lucas has grown exponentially since 1976, when the Mexican government fingered it as the next big opportunity for tourist development. It now hovers between 60,000 and 100,000 residents, depending on who you ask.
Vaughn marches me through a partially completed mansion to view the surging Pacific far below. Concrete is being poured 24/7 down there, facilitated by a tunnel dug through the mountain to speed up logistics. The retaining wall of one new hotel looks like a mere line drawn in the sand. "They might have a problem with a hurricane down there," he says, without condemnation, for most anything can be attempted in Cabo.
I ask how southern Baja's going to provide water for all the multiplying thousands. "De-sal." He draws the word out. "It's a piece of cake."
And what about the briny by-product of desalination, and all the various runoffs? Vaughn just smiles. "Look at that ocean out there. I don't think we have a problem."
