Mulegé
"The river was the strangest thing — in all that desert, a sound of water moving through reeds, and the smell of damp earth."
You smell Mulegé before you see it. Driving south on the Transpeninsular highway, the chaparral suddenly gives way to something green and dense and wet-smelling, and the road drops down into a town built along a river that has no business existing in this desert. The Río Santa Rosalía runs through Mulegé from a freshwater spring somewhere in the sierra above, flanked by date palms so tall and so numerous they form a kind of green cathedral above the muddy riverbanks, and the combined effect — river, palms, sea somewhere just ahead — is of an oasis so complete it seems placed there deliberately, like a rest stop for the peninsula.
The town itself has about three thousand people and the particular ease of places that have been left mostly alone by development. The main street has a pharmacy, a couple of restaurants with hand-painted menus in the window, a tortillería where you can buy warm corn tortillas by weight in a plastic bag. The mission of Santa Rosalía de Mulegé sits on a small hill above the river, white against the desert hills, built in 1766 and still the visual anchor of the town. I sat in the churchyard in the early morning and listened to the bells and the doves and the distant sound of the river, and felt time slow to something manageable.
The cave paintings in the Sierra de San Francisco, forty kilometers north, are what Mulegé is arguably most significant for — though you would not know it from the town itself, which does not traffic in its own importance. The paintings are UNESCO World Heritage listed, some of them reaching ten meters in height, depicting deer and bighorn sheep and human figures in red and black and white ochres that have lasted ten thousand years in the shelter of the canyon walls. To reach them requires a mule ride and a guided hike down into canyon country that feels genuinely remote — the kind of remote where the silence is physical, where you stop walking because you want to hear the silence rather than the sound of your own footsteps. The figures on the rock had been watching this canyon for a hundred centuries. I found this more moving than I expected to.
The estuary where the river meets the sea is a birdwatcher’s place — herons and egrets and oystercatchers working the tidal flats, pelicans fishing in the deeper channel. You can rent a kayak from a man near the bridge for almost nothing and paddle the estuary for an afternoon, which is one of the more quietly excellent things to do in southern Baja. The water is calm and the current gentle and the date palms close overhead and the pelicans ignore you completely.
Eating in Mulegé means eating what is available, which turns out to be extremely good. One restaurant near the river served me a plate of freshly caught corvina — sea bass — grilled with garlic and lime and served with rice and a salad of tomatoes from a garden I was told was literally behind the building. The tortillas came warm and soft and we went through three baskets. The owner was also the cook and the waiter. When he was not cooking he sat at a table near the door doing a crossword puzzle and looking out at the river.
When to go: October through April for comfortable temperatures. The summer heat in Mulegé is significant — this is desert, despite the river — and July and August can push into ranges that make outdoor activity genuinely difficult by midday. The cave painting tours run year-round but October through March offers the most comfortable conditions for the hike.