Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

Cabo San Lucas is a small city at the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula, in the municipality of Los Cabos in the state of Baja California Sur, Mexico. As of 2003, the population was some 40,000 people.

Cabo San Lucas. Photo credit: rmullis. Check out more photos of all our featured destinations in our photo gallery.

Spring Break

Cabo San Lucas is a popular Spring Break destination. The people mentioned on the hit MTV show Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County take their spring break here. Small sections of the motion picture Troy were filmed on some of the beaches near Cabo San Lucas. Professional hockey player Brett Hull married longtime sweetheart Darcie Schollmeyer in Cabo San Lucas.

Hotels and Restaurants

Coming soon.

Clubs and Bars

Coming soon.

Attractions

In 1990, Rocker Sammy Hagar opened his own nightclub and restaurant, Cabo Wabo. To this day it is one of the most popular attractions in Cabo San Lucas.

Cabo San Lucas has the largest Marlin tournament in the world, with a $1,000,000 jackpot. In the winter, pods of whales can be observed in the ocean - they bear their calves in the warm waters there.

Tourism

Cabo San Lucas has become an important vacation and spa destination, with a great variety of sites of interest, and timeshares that have been built on the coast between San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo. The distinctive El Arco de Cabo San Lucas is a local landmark.

Cabo San Lucas is quickly becoming a high-end holiday destination with a number of resorts and timeshare clubs appearing along the coast between San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo.

Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo are served by Los Cabos International Airport. The town is also a popular port of call for many cruise ships.

The Golden Corridor

Cabo San Lucas raucous party atmosphere and San Jose's laid-back colonial style are bridged by a golf course- and resort-studded Tourist Corridor that stretches between the twin towns in 20 miles of pristine white sand beaches and craggy coves.

Exclusive hotels and gated residential communities attracting a wide clientele of rich and famous weave seamlessly amid this wonderous landscape and comprise this region known as "The Corridor". Many of these properties, which are considered some of Latin America's top resorts, have become havens to Hollywood stars, Fortune 500 C.E.O.s and even the U.S. president during the 2002 Asia-Pacific Economic Conference (APEC).

Climate

Coming soon.

Good to know

The main language in Acapulco is Spanish, although English is widely spoken throughout the tourist areas.

Most establishments accept U.S. dollars, even though the Mexican Peso is the official currency.

History and Development

It is thought the first humans came to the southern end of the peninsula 14,000 years ago. When the first Europeans arrived, nomadic groups of Pericu survived on a subsistence diet based on the gathering of fruit, seeds, roots, and shellfish, as well as hunting and fishing. They lived a Neolithic lifestyle, without metals.

The First Europeans

Hernan Cortes, in 1535, and Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, in 1542, were the first Europeans to reach the coasts of Cabo San Lucas.

In March 1602 the Viceroy Count of Monterrey, Gaspar Zuniga y Acevedo, appointed General Sebastian Vizcaino to lead the exploration of coastal California in search of ports of refuge for the galleons of Manila.

From May 5 of that year to February 21, 1603, Vizcaino guided three ships, named the San Diego, the Santo Tomas, and the Tres Reyes. They sailed from the port of Acapulco north to the cape at Mendocino, California, in the company of the cosmographers Geronimo Marti Palacios and the Carmelite monk Antonio de la Ascension, who during the voyage named the places visited, made maps and prepared courses and journals describing the coast that would be used for the navigation of those places until the end of the 18th century.

Their maps of the California coastline are admirable for their precision and exacting detail; it was on that exploratory voyage that Cabo San Lucas was given its present name, dedicating it to Saint Luke.

The Town's Founding

Although humans have lived on the southern portion of the Baja California peninsula for thousands of years, including the region of Cabo San Lucas, it was not until the beginning of the 20th century that a fishing village began to develop in that area. In 1917, an American company built a floating platform to catch tuna, and ten years later founded the Compania de Productos Marinos, S.A., which gave rise to the village.

The Development Boom

The warmth of the waters at Cabo San Lucas, the beauty of its beaches, the abundance of sport fish, and other qualities, motivated a great number of both foreign and Mexican vacationers to spend their vacations in large-scale tourist developments there, starting from 1974 when the Mexican government created the infrastructure to turn Cabo San Lucas into one of the most attractive centers for tourism in Mexico.

This article has been modified from its original version (available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabo_San_Lucas) and is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.