Los Cabos’ beginnings as a tourist destination in the 1950s were exceedingly modest, so much so that the name Los Cabos wouldn’t even be coined for another 30 years. In 1951, when Carmen Fisher opened the Casa Fisher guesthouse in San José del Cabo, the population of that town was a few thousand, while cape sister Cabo San Lucas boasted a population of only 300.
By the mid-1950s, her rooms were mostly rented to the people building Hotel Las Cruces Palmilla, just outside San José on a beach where cattle were still loaded onto offshore ships. The resort would eventually become iconic as One&Only Palmilla but in its early days, the property opened in 1956 by Abelardo “Rod” Rodriguez Jr. and wife Lucille Bremer was anything but prepossessing.
“For Christ’s sake, that’s a boarding house, not a hotel!” quipped Conrad Hilton to Los Cabos pioneer hotel builder Luis Cóppola on the subject of Hotel Palmilla’s 15-room inventory. Of course, it bears noting that Hilton was a guest in the hotel at the time, joining other well-known names among Palmilla’s small but celebrity-rich clientele. It didn’t 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 pioneer age of Los Cabos tourism
Most Los Cabos hotels until the early 1970s, two decades into the destination’s development, had no more than two dozen or so rooms each.
“Everyone thought we were crazy because we were the first ones to start with more than 20 rooms,” remembered Cóppola’s son, Luis Cóppola Jr. in Baja Explorer about the opening of the Hotel Finsterra in 1972. “They probably weren’t wrong because we suffered for 10 years. For 10 years there was no highway. The road seldom brought tourists down here. We didn’t have a major airport. We had to bring our people from La Paz in small aircraft as did everybody else.”
Finisterra wasn’t actually the first hotel in Los Cabos with more than 20 rooms. For example, the landmark Hotel Cabo San Lucas that Bud Parr and Cóppola built near Chileno Bay in 1961 had 62 rooms completed when Sports Illustrated visited for its second annual Swimsuit Issue in 1965.
But Cóppola Jr.’s point was correct. Because of the difficulties of getting hotels built — Bud Parr and Cóppola had to fly in equipment, supplies, and manpower from the Mexican mainland to finish the Hotel Cabo San Lucas — and the lack of easy accessibility to Southern Baja, tourism was extremely small-scale. It was only after the Transpeninsular Highway was completed in 1973 and the Los Cabos International Airport opened in San José del Cabo in 1977 that Los Cabos was ready for large-scale tourism. Even then, it wasn’t until a US $44 million makeover in 1992 that the international airport could handle DC-10s and 747s.
By then, Los Cabos had grown its hotel inventory to 2,600 rooms thanks to all the important pioneer hotels built in previous decades, including the Hotel Hacienda (1963), Hotel Mar de Cortés (1972), and Hotel Solmar (1974) in Cabo San Lucas, the Twin Dolphin (1977) in the Tourist Corridor, and Hotel El Presidente (1981) and the Tropicana Inn (1985) in San José del Cabo.
Big-name brands come to Los Cabos
The 1990s was the decade of rapid expansion in Los Cabos. Between 1980 and 1997, Baja California Sur more than doubled its available hotel rooms, from 3,581 to 7,829. Much of that explosion occurred in Los Cabos, which started the 1990s with a little over 2,000 hotel rooms and a mission, per FONATUR, Mexico’s tourism development agency, to hit 8,000 by 2000.
Conrad Hilton, who had scoffed at Los Cabos’ ability to host a Hilton in earlier decades, broke ground on what would become the Hilton Los Cabos (2002) in the early 1990s. Other major hospitality brands were already building. The Westin Regina Los Cabos, with its spectacular arch-like Sordo Madaleno architecture, premiered in 1993. The Hacienda del Mar followed in 1996, receiving the Sheraton imprimatur in 1999.
Mexican-owned Pueblo Bonito opened its first two resorts, Blanco and Rosé, in the 1990s. San José del Cabo saw the birth of two iconic downtown hotels: El Encanto Inn (1998) and Casa Natalia (1999).
The rise of the luxury resort in Los Cabos
Las Ventanas al Paraíso, a Rosewood Resort, was the most influential Los Cabos resort to open in the 1990s. Managed by hotelier Edward Steiner, it was the first true luxury resort to open in the area. One&Only Palmilla rebooted the old Hotel Las Cruces Palmilla, owned after Rodriguez by Don Koll, who brought Jack Nicklaus to Los Cabos to build two signature golf courses (Palmilla and the Cabo del Sol Ocean Course). When One&Only began to manage Palmilla in 2004, they expanded the room inventory, added a 25,000-square-foot spa, and brought the first celebrity chef (Charlie Trotter) to Los Cabos.
More resorts opened in the 2000s, including 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 grown to 63 hotels featuring 12,981 rooms, blowing by FONATUR’s original projection of 12,000 rooms as the ultimate goal for the destination. Building intensified after Hurricane Odile in 2014, with The Cape, A Thompson Hotel (2015), Breathless (2016), Grand Velas (2016), Chileno Bay Resort (2017), Garza Blanca (2017), Le Blanc (2018), and Montage (2018) all opening between 2015 and 2020.
Many of these were (and still are) luxurious. However, it helped that luxury standard-bearers like Four Seasons (the Four Seasons Resort Los Cabos at Costa Palmas premiered in 2019, the Four Seasons Resort at Cabo del Sol in 2024); Ritz-Carlton (Zadún, A Ritz-Carlton Reserve opened in 2019); and Waldorf Astoria (which took over The Resort at Pedregal, formerly Capella Pedregal, in 2019) also bought into Los Cabos as a world-class luxury destination.
Hotels and resorts in Los Cabos today
The hotels and resorts I’ve mentioned aren’t all the ones that have opened or are open today in Los Cabos as there are currently about 18,000 hotel rooms (down from the all-time high of 22,213 in March 2022), with about half (9,199) in Cabo San Lucas, over 4,000 in the Tourist Corridor, and over 3,400 in San José del Cabo. If history has taught us anything, more are on the way.
On that note, several new hotels and resorts are projected to open in the next few years, adding about 700 new rooms.
Chris Sands is the Cabo San Lucas local expert for the USA Today travel website 10 Best, writer of Fodor’s Los Cabos travel guidebook and a contributor to numerous websites and publications, including Tasting Table, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler, Forbes Travel Guide, Porthole Cruise, Cabo Living and Mexico News Daily. His specialty is travel-related content and lifestyle features focused on food, wine and golf.
