Loreto
"The mission bell rang at seven and the square smelled of lime trees and coffee and I thought: this is still a town that belongs to itself."
I arrived in Loreto on a Tuesday, which turned out to be the perfect day — no cruise ships, no scheduled activities, just the town operating at its own pace. The zócalo was occupied by the usual coalition of retired men playing dominoes in the shade of the old laurel trees, a woman selling paletas from a wheeled cooler, and two cats conducting a territorial negotiation in the doorway of the pharmacy. The mission church, Nuestra Señora de Loreto, stood at the north end of the square looking the way it has looked since 1697, which is the year the Jesuits founded the first permanent European settlement on the Baja California peninsula here. The white facade catches the morning light differently than it catches the afternoon light, and by evening it glows a kind of amber that makes the small square seem lit from inside.
Loreto was the first capital of the Californias — this small, slow, thoroughly pleasant town was once the administrative center for a territory stretching from here to what is now Oregon. That history sits quietly in the architecture: the wide mission walls, the old convent now housing a regional museum, the grids of colonial streets that give way, just a block or two from the church, to the simple concrete houses and corner stores of a town that has not been consumed by its own past.
The Sea of Cortez is what pulls most people here now, and with reason. The water in the bay is calm — sheltered by the Sierra de la Giganta mountains that rise directly behind the town — and the color changes through the day from deep blue at midmorning to a hammered silver by late afternoon. A dozen islands lie within half a day’s reach by panga: Isla del Carmen, Isla Coronado with its thermal spring, the uninhabited Isla Danzante. I took a guided kayak trip that put in at the beach north of town and paddled south along the coast for four hours, stopping at a sea cave and a beach where I ate the lunch I had packed — a cold chicken from the evening before, some fruit, a bottle of water — watching a sea lion haul itself up a flat rock twenty meters away and arrange itself with the slow dignity of the genuinely comfortable.
The fish tacos in Loreto deserve their reputation. There are four or five places in town competing for the same customers, and the competition produces results. The freshest fish comes from the pangas that tie up at the municipal dock in the morning. By noon the restaurants have it on the menu. At one small place on a side street I had a plate of dorado — mahi-mahi — battered and fried, with a homemade chipotle aioli and a curtido of pickled red cabbage, and a Jamaica agua fresca the color of a good Tempranillo. It cost less than three dollars.
The town does not have the anonymized feel of a tourist economy fully metastasized. There is a gringo presence — retirees who discovered the place in the seventies and never left, snowbirds with small houses near the beach — but they seem to have been absorbed rather than having absorbed the town. The hardware store is still a hardware store. The carnitas cart on the corner operates for the neighborhood, not for Instagram. Loreto is a town where the travel works best if you slow to its speed, which is not very fast at all.
When to go: October through April for ideal water and air temperatures. The Sea of Cortez sees whale sharks from October through February. November through March brings the best diving and snorkeling conditions. July and August are hot and humid, with occasional tropical storm activity — the locals call this summer and mostly try to stay near something cold.