Stay in Luxury at These New Sophisticated Resorts in Los Cabos
With several new resorts, Los Cabos—already one of Mexico’s most popular areas—adds another dimension: refined, low-key luxury.

A drone hovered over a beach between the Pacific and the Sea of Cortés in southern Baja. The device was piloted by a crew documenting the re-branding of the new Viceroy Los Cabos, a striking minimalist structure where almost every room views the ocean and whitewashed walls contrast with the turquoise sea. You’ve seen the overhead tracking shot: waves breaking onto white sand giving way to guests languorously floating in charcoal pools.
It’s said there are dos Cabos to Los Cabos, with the spring-break-heavy Cabo San Lucas to the southwest and the colonial town of San José del Cabo to the northeast. But if the drone pulled up higher it would see a third Cabo in the making, with a dozen other resorts under construction along the coast where the Sonoran Desert kisses the ocean: Nobu, Aman, Solaz, Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton.
This third wave is not so much about revisiting the old party-town-versus-serenity debate, but rather a region-wide integration of the best of Cabo, with better food, more tasteful design, and a truer sense of place. Yes, you can have your margarita, but it’s likely to be made with an artisanal spirit like sotol. Yes, you can get a massage and an ionized salt bath in a world-class spa, but you are also encouraged to venture off-resort to taste a local food boom in the making. And thankfully, the newer resorts are less fantasy hacienda and more urbane and sophisticated.
I arrived in Los Cabos reluctantly, being neither a stop-and-flop resortgoer nor a nightfly. I came at a time when the region tops many national lists: the most expensive city, the fastest-growing population, and an unprecedented number of resorts in the works.
Everywhere I went that wasn’t behind a resort wall there were cranes, rebar, and private buses shuttling hotel workers. But even more overwhelming was the dramatic topography and stunning weather that keeps visitors coming: Swaths of the bluest sky and wide beaches extending for miles in both directions.
Turn inland and there’s the desert, all gradations of red, umber, taupe, and gray. Look seaward and the ocean is midnight blue or blue-green, and unforgiving in its rip currents. It’s gorgeous and thrilling, and locals well know that Cabo can give and take away.

Viceroy
“Whenever you talk about the evolution of Los Cabos, you need to talk about the hurricanes,” said Martin Kipping, general manager of Viceroy. In 2014, Hurricane Odile devastated the region, leaving $1 billion in damage and taking legendary enclaves like One&Only Palmilla down to the studs. “It gave Los Cabos a chance to reconsider what it should be.” Rooms from $425.

Montage Los Cabos
To experience the latest grand opening, I checked in to Montage Los Cabos, the first international property from the ultra-premium U.S.-based hotel group. The resort’s low-slung buildings of stacked stone and simple timber are minimalist and oriented toward three levels of pool leading down toward a dramatic reveal of the beach, as romantic as any I’ve seen.
This could be Puglia, except the music of Mexican songstress Natalia Lafourcade was playing on the sound system at the beachside restaurant Marea, where there was smoked dashi on the yellowtail and chevron-patterned tile on the floor.
Along with details like these, the resort manages to hit all the notes of a highest-common-denominator Mexican vacation, and I quickly fell into a pattern: a walk to the beach for a bracing ocean swim; pre-lunch massage to work out the kinks of urban life; local fish at the midday meal; a fresh fruit paleta (popsicle) before a dip in the pool; and finally a mezcal to ease into the evening. Rooms from $625.

Drift San José
Before midsize luxury resorts started to scale Mexican modernism in Los Cabos, there were, as there often are, smaller pioneers who proved the theory. To experience the first movers, I wandered into San José del Cabo to visit Drift San José, the first “cool” hotel to open in town, I was told.
There, under the shade of palm trees and a rough timber pergola in a gravel courtyard, I sipped mezcal next to a plunge pool surrounded by simple rooms with glass-and-steel doors. Vintage disco played on the sound system. Fortified, I wandered through the arts district as the sun dropped, the heat broke, and the town came to life. Young and old couples danced on the square.
Families who’d ventured off-resort wearing pastel polos, driving mocs, and pressed khaki shorts took photos in front of the little cathedral. This wasn’t the Cabo of yore that cosseted the Brads and Jennifers, or that of the party-hearty Sammy Hagars and Charlie Sheens. It is, dare I say, for the sophisticated international traveler who enjoys his culture as much as his cabana.
Outside town, nature is surprisingly untamed. One morning I took a taxi to the northeast of San José del Cabo, where at first the highway was so smooth and manicured it could have been a planned development outside Scottsdale. Then, in an instant, the road turned to dirt, freshly rutted by a recent storm, and there, atop a hill, was a streak of verdant jungle fed by aquifers from the Sierra de la Laguna. Rooms from $145.

Acre
In this oasis of palm trees and gardens was Acre, a collection of bungalows and tree houses set discreetly behind birdsof-paradise and cacti along meandering paths. In a shaded room off the openair restaurant, Acre’s head bartender, Dani Tatarin, used a copper still to create essential oils and hydrosols from a local crop of kaffir lime, lavender, and lemon verbena, literally infusing the essence of Cabos into the cocktail offerings.
An integral part of the mature Cabo resort-building boom is private ownership of vacation homes with price tags in the low millions and the same stunning desert and sea views. They were at the Montage and Chileno Bay and the Viceroy, as well as the yet-to-be-completed Nobus and Four Seasons. And now even an independent like Acre is expanding, with a collection of fractional-ownership bungalows under construction. Rooms from $275.

Cape, a Thompson Hotel
The closest I allowed myself to get to Cabo San Lucas proper was the Cape, a Thompson Hotel, one of the first modernist resorts in the region. The building is cut into a dramatic beach three miles from town, its mezzanine offering a cinematic view of the El Arco rock formation in the distance.
At the hotel’s Manta restaurant I ate roasted sweet potato alongside what might be the best tortilla and mole I’ve had since a recent trip to Mexico City—as it should be: The restaurant is overseen by Enrique Olvera, the celebrity chef behind the city’s renowned Pujol. Rooms from $350.

Chileno Bay
On my final night, at Chileno Bay, another recently opened property, I saw much of what I’d experienced at Montage: cascading infinity pools. The smell of pineapple sizzling on the rotisserie wafts up from the taco and tequila bar TnT. (Serving street food of the D.F. is definitely a Cabo trend.)
I had yet another world-class meal—plantain and masa tortillas with cochinita pibil and, yes, another sotol—at Comal, Chileno Bay’s restaurant. To the east, another half-constructed luxury resort, the Luxury Collection’s marble and wood Solaz, glowed in the setting sun, with hundreds of miles of unspoiled coastline still looming behind it.
In 1951 John Steinbeck, one of the first writers to chronicle a trip to Baja, wrote The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Flush from the success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck spent six weeks cataloging the tide pools and crustaceans up and down the peninsula long before the first grand hotel was constructed.
“Let us go into the Sea of Cortez,” Steinbeck wrote as he embarked on his journey, wise enough to know that travel and curiosity in some way always alter the course of a place. Like a hurricane. Or a hotel. “We shall take something away from it,” he wrote, “but we shall leave something too.” Rooms from $650.
Explore More in Hotels
Become a DEPARTURES VIP
Join our Weekly Newsletter