Todos Santos

Todos Santos sits at the junction of two climates — the Pacific fog that rolls in off the ocean and the Baja desert heat that arrives from the interior — and that tension gives the town a particular quality of light, slightly diffused, never quite harsh. I arrived in October, which is mango season’s end but still warm, and the streets had the feel of a place returning to itself after a busy summer. A dog followed me from the main square to the art district for no reason I could determine and then sat down in the shade of a doorway and watched me walk on.

The town has been an artist colony since the 1980s, when a combination of cheap rents, extraordinary light, and the kind of isolation that forces productivity drew painters and potters and writers who needed distance from somewhere else. Some of them left. Many stayed, or their studios stayed even after they left, and the result is a town where galleries occupy nineteenth-century sugar mill buildings and where you can buy serious Mexican ceramics next to surf wax and Oaxacan mezcal. The art is not decorative in the resort-town sense. At one gallery I spent an hour with paintings that made me genuinely uncomfortable in the way only work with something real behind it can. The painter, I later learned, had lived in the town for twenty-six years.

The Pacific beach is nothing like the Sea of Cortez beaches that characterize most of southern Baja. It is wide and dark-sanded and the surf is violent in a way that makes it beautiful to watch and inadvisable to enter. Playa La Pastora stretches north from the town for kilometers with essentially no infrastructure — no palapas, no vendors, just the sand and the ocean and the occasional surfer in a wetsuit reading the break from the shore before committing. I walked for an hour and turned around and walked back and the beach looked exactly the same in both directions, which is the particular luxury of an unbuilt coast. The fog had come in by then, softening everything, and the surfers in the water were reduced to silhouettes.

The Hotel California exists and is nothing to do with the Eagles song — the owners have made a comfortable peace with the joke, turning it into a sort of light marketing — but the town’s actual culinary life is better than its fame suggests. There are restaurants here cooking with local ingredients at a level that would sustain them in any city. I ate at a place in a courtyard off the main street: roasted beet salad with goat cheese from a ranch thirty kilometers north, snapper baked in a sauce built from local chiles, a dessert of caramelized plantain with cream. Everything tasted like it had been grown in the same sky it was being eaten under.

The town occupies an interesting position between something and something else. It is not yet Cabo San Lucas — it has not surrendered to that kind of scale. But it is not as isolated as it was ten years ago. New hotels have appeared, slightly more expensive than they need to be. The art scene has acquired enough reputation to attract buyers who were not looking for Todos Santos specifically, which changes it. I think it is still finding its answer to the question every place with beauty and good art has to eventually answer: how to share itself without selling itself.

When to go: November through April for the ideal climate — cooler, drier, with excellent surf conditions. October brings the end of mango season and lighter crowds. The whale shark season in the nearby waters of the Pacific lagoons overlaps with winter months.