The beginnings of Los Cabos as a tourist destination in the 1950s were extremely modest, so much so that the name of Los Cabos would not even be invented for 30 years. In 1951, when Carmen Fisher opened the guest house Casa Fisher in San José del Cabo, the population of this city was a few thousand, while Cap Cabo San Lucas had a population of 300 inhabitants.
In the mid -1950s, its rooms were mainly rented to the People Building Hotel Las Cruces Palmilla, just outside San José on a beach where livestock was still loaded on offshore ships. The complex would eventually become emblematic as Palmilla and unique, but in its beginnings, the property opened its doors in 1956 by Abelardo “Rod” Rodriguez Jr. and his wife Lucille Bremer were anything but avant-garde.
“For the love of Christ, it’s a pension, not a hotel!” joked Conrad Hilton at Los Cabos Pioneer Hotel Builder Luis Cóppola On the subject of the inventory of 15 rooms from the Palmilla hotel. Of course, it should be noted that Hilton was a guest at the hotel at the time, joining other well -known names among the little ones of Palmilla but customers rich in celebrities. It did not hurt that Rodriguez was the son of a former president of Mexico and Bremer was a former actress who had once shared screen time with Fred Astaire.
The age of the Los Cabos tourism pioneer
Most Los Cabos hotels until the early 1970s, at two decades of destination development, had no more than two dozen rooms each.
“Everyone thought that we were crazy because we were the first to start with more than 20 rooms,” recalls Cóppola’s son, Luis Cóppola Jr. at Baja Explorer about the opening of the Finsterra hotel in 1972. “They probably didn’t deceive themselves because we suffered for 10 years. For 10 years, there was no highway. did not have a major airport.
Finisterra was not actually the first Los Cabos hotel with more than 20 rooms. For example, the Landmark Cabo San Lucas hotel that Bud Parr and Cóppola built near the Bay of Chileno in 1961 had 62 rooms completed when Sports Illustrated visited for its second annual annual Swimsuit problem in 1965.
But the point of Cóppola Jr. was correct. Due to the difficulties of building hotels – Bud Parr and Cóppola had to fly in the equipment, supplies and labor of the Mexican continent to finish the Cabo San Lucas hotel – and the easy accessibility to southern baja, tourism was extremely small. It was only after the TranspeninsUlar highway was completed in 1973 and that Los Cabos International Airport opened its doors to San José del Cabo in 1977 that Los Cabos was ready for large -scale tourism. Even then, it is only to a 44 million dollars retalor In 1992, the international airport could manage the DC-10 and 747.
Until then, Los Cabos had transformed its inventory of the hotel at 2,600 rooms thanks to all the important pioneering hotels built in previous decades, including the Hacienda hotel (1963), the Mar de Cortés (1972), and the Solmar (1974) hotel in Cabo San Lucas, the Twin Dolphin (1977) in the Tourist Corridor and the Hotel El President (1981) Tourist corridor and Hotel El President (1981) and Le (1977) Tropicana Inn (1985) in San José del Cabo.
The big brands come to Los Cabos
The 1990s were the decade of rapid expansion in Los Cabos. Between 1980 and 1997, Baja California on more than doubled its available hotel rooms, from 3,581 to 7,829. A large part of this explosion occurred in Los Cabos, which began the 1990s with just over 2,000 hotel rooms and a mission, by Fonatur, the Mexican tourism development agency, to reach 8,000 by 2000.
Conrad Hilton, who laughed at the capacity of Los Cabos to welcome a Hilton in previous decades, inaugurated what was going to become the Hilton Los Cabos (2002) in the early 1990s. Other major hotel brands were already built. The Westin Regina Los Cabos, with its spectacular ark Magdalene Soro Architecture, created in 1993. Hacienda del Mar followed in 1996, receiving the Sheraton Imprimatur in 1999.
Pueblo Bonito belonging to Mexican opened its first two seaside resorts, Blanco and Rosé, in the 1990s. San José del Cabo saw the birth of two emblematic hotels in the city center: El inn inn (1998) and Casa Natalia (1999).
The rise of the luxury station in Los Cabos
Paradise Windows, Rosewood Resort, was the most influential Los Cabos Resort to open In the 1990s. Managed by the hoteler Edward Steiner, it was the first real luxury complex open in the region. One and unique Palmilla has restarted the old Las Cruces Palmilla hotel, detained after Rodriguez de Don Koll, who brought Jack Nicklaus to Los Cabos to build Two signature golf courses (Palmilla and Cabo del Sol Ocean Race). When one and only began to manage the Palmilla in 2004, they widened the inventory of the room, added a 25,000 square feet spa and brought the first famous chief (Charlie Trotter) to Los Cabos.
More stations opened in the 2000s, notably Esperanza, Auberge Resorts Collection (2002), Marquis Los Cabos (2003), Casa del Mar (2004), Pueblo Bonito’s Sunset Beach (2005), Dreams Los Cabos (2007) and Capella Pedregal (2009). By 2015, Los Cabos had increased to 63 hotels with 12,981 roomsBased by the original projection of Fonatur of 12,000 rooms as a ultimate goal for the destination. The building intensified after Hurricane Odile in 2014, with The Cape, in Thompson Hotel (2015), Breathless (2016), Grand Velas (2016), Chileno Bay Resort (2017), Garza Blanca (2017), Le Blanc (2018) and Montage (2018) all have the opening between 2015 and 2020.
Many of them were (and are still) luxurious. However, this helped that luxury norms like Four Seasons (the Resort Four Seasons Los Cabos de Costa Palmas in the first in 2019, the Four Seasons Resort in Cabo del Sol in 2024); Ritz-Carlton (Zadún, a reserve of Ritz-Carlton opened in 2019); And Waldorf Astoria (which took over the Pedregal complex, formerly Capella Pedregal, in 2019) also bought Los Cabos as a luxury world class destination.
Hotels and stations in Los Cabos today
The hotels and the stations I mentioned are not all those who have opened or opened today in Los Cabos because it currently exists 18,000 hotel rooms (Down the top of all time of 22,213 in March 2022), with around half (9,199) in Cabo San Lucas, more than 4,000 in the tourist corridor and more than 3,400 in San José del Cabo. If history has taught us something, others are on the way.
On this note, several New hotels and stations should open in the coming years, adding around 700 new rooms.
Chris Sands is the local expert of Cabo San Lucas for the USA TODAY 10 BEST travel website, writer of the Los Cabos Travel Guide in Fodor and contributor to many websites and publications, including Table, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler, Forbes Travel Guide, Portthole Cruise, Cabo Living and Mexico News Daily. Its specialty is the content linked to travel and lifestyle characteristics focused on food, wine and golf.
