How to Elope in Todos Santos, an Hour From Cabo and Facing the Other Way
Same airport, same price, and a coast that actually gives you the sun going into the sea. The catch is that most of the beaches here are not for swimming.
A Todos Santos elopement is $7,300 for one day, $8,900 for two and $11,400 for three, in US dollars for the two of you, with the planning, the ceremony, the municipal permit, the flowers, hair and makeup for one, my photography and my film all inside the figure. It is the same number I charge anywhere in Mexico.
Which is the whole argument for this town. It sits an hour up Highway 19 from the same airport that serves Los Cabos, it costs exactly the same to elope in, and it gives you something the entire Mexican Caribbean physically cannot: the sun going down into the sea.
The thing you have to plan around here is the water itself. Most of the beaches immediately west of town are not swimming beaches, whatever they look like in a photograph, and pretending otherwise is how people get hurt.
(Continued on Page 2, Col. 1)
Why choose Todos Santos over Los Cabos?
They are the same flights and about an hour apart, and they are not the same trip. Los Cabos is a resort corridor with the best infrastructure in Baja, the arch at Land's End, and genuinely calm swimming water on the Sea of Cortez side. If you want to be looked after and to swim off the beach outside your room, go there and I will build it.
Todos Santos is a town. A mission, a square, a grid of low pastel walls, a few hundred people who live there, and a Pacific coastline west of it that is open, high and mostly empty. The evening ceremony happens on the bluffs with the sun going into the water, which the Caribbean side of this country cannot produce at all and the Cortez side of this peninsula mostly cannot either.
The cost me money version: if you are coming to Baja for four nights and you want to swim, drink well and never think about a road, Cabo is the better purchase and I will say so on the call. Todos Santos rewards couples who want somewhere that feels found rather than booked, and who do not mind that the sea in front of them is for looking at.
What does the municipal permit actually involve?
Todos Santos sits inside the Municipality of La Paz, which has a published process covering weddings on beaches and on private property. This is unusually clear by the standards of coastal Mexico and it is one of the reasons I like working here.
The file wants: the application, identification, the venue or responsible party's written consent, a security quotation, Civil Protection approval, consent from the federal environment and coastal zone authorities where the beach is involved, and an ambulance arrangement. The published fee is around 1,375 pesos without alcohol and just under 5,950 pesos with it. The stated maximum turnaround is one business day once the file is complete.
None of that is hard. All of it needs somebody to actually do it, which is the job, and it is inside your figure rather than billed as an extra line.
One limit worth understanding: nothing you put on the sand may block passage through the twenty metre federal maritime zone. The beach stays public even while your chairs are on it. Anyone promising you a closed beach in Mexico is promising something they do not control.
Which beaches can you actually swim at?
Not the ones directly west of town. La Cachora and La Poza in particular have steep shore break, heavy backwash and rip currents, and they are not dependable swimming beaches at all. They photograph beautifully. That is exactly the problem, because the photograph is what people plan around.
Los Cerritos, a few minutes south, is the usual swimming and surfing alternative, and even there rips occur on a bigger swell. If swimming matters to you we plan a specific beach and a specific morning for it rather than assuming the sand outside your door will do.
The same logic applies an hour south at Land's End, where Lover's Beach on the Cortez side is swimmable and Divorce Beach on the Pacific side, two minutes' walk away, is not. The names are not a joke and they are not marketing.
So the day here is built on the bluffs and in the town, with the water as the backdrop rather than the venue. That turns out to be the better day anyway, because the high ground is where the light is.
What is the charter, and is it worth it?
On the Signature and the Honeymoon you choose one private charter and it is included at the listed price. A motor yacht with a captain and crew, or a helicopter. They cost you the same and I do not push either one.
The boat is the better photograph and the slower day. It takes you down to the arch at Land's End, which is a stack of granite with a hole cut through it and genuinely cannot be seen properly from land, and you can swim off the back of it in water that is calm on that side of the peninsula.
The helicopter is sixty minutes and an entirely different proposition, which is the desert meeting two oceans from above. If you have limited days and want the widest possible view of what this peninsula actually is, take it.
When should you come?
November through April. Cooler, drier, and the window I will push you toward without much negotiation. The town is at its best and the bluffs are comfortable to stand on in the evening.
May through August gets hot and humid, increasingly so as the summer runs on. September and October carry the most consequential rain and hurricane risk on this coast. The official eastern Pacific season runs from the fifteenth of May to the thirtieth of November, with peak activity normally landing across July to September.
If whales matter, look at January through March. More on that below, including the part most pages leave out.
Will you see whales?
Possibly, and I will not promise it. Grey whales move down the Pacific side of Baja through the winter and the widely reported window for this stretch is roughly mid December to mid April, strongest across January to March.
Here is the part almost nobody writes down. Todos Santos is not one of the officially listed whale watching sites for Baja California Sur. The official list names places like Cabo San Lucas, Cabo Pulmo, Puerto Chale and Bahía Magdalena. Whales offshore here are a real and fairly common thing to see from the bluffs or from a boat, and they are not a booked, regulated, guaranteed encounter the way they are at the listed sites.
So I treat them as an upside rather than the spine of a trip. If a whale morning is the thing you actually want, say so and I will build the day at a site that is set up to deliver it, and tell you what that changes about the rest of the itinerary.
What about the East Cape, and the three day version?
This peninsula is narrow and has two entirely different coasts on it, which is the whole reason the three day itinerary exists rather than being two days with a day bolted on.
The Pacific side is dramatic, windy, cold in the water and gives you the sunset. The Sea of Cortez side is calm, warm, swimmable and gives you almost nothing in the way of an evening. They are ninety minutes apart and having both inside one trip is the thing couples remember.
The East Cape in particular is the half the corridor never sends anybody to: long empty beaches, warm water, almost nothing built. On a three day plan it is where the honeymoon part properly starts, and it is usually the day that stops feeling like a wedding at all.
What does the day actually look like?
It starts in the town, early. Hair and makeup come to you, and we walk the pastel streets and the mission square at about seven while the place is still completely still. Bougainvillea over white render, long shadows, nobody at all. That hour produces roughly a third of the gallery and costs nothing except being awake.
The middle of the day is deliberately empty. Lunch, sleep, the heat. There is no useful outdoor light between about eleven and four here and I would rather plan for that than pretend I can work through it.
The ceremony goes in the last hour of light on the bluffs west of town. Open ground, high above the water, and the sun going down into the Pacific behind you. I choose the exact position on the day rather than on a map, because the wind comes up the face in the afternoon and the difference between a good spot and an unusable one is about thirty metres.
Then we stay out past the point most people leave. The twenty minutes after the sun has actually gone are the best light this coast produces: the wind usually drops, the sky moves through a range of colours the water gives back, and there is nobody left on the bluff. On the Honeymoon the evening finishes at a table on the sand with candles and a musician.
Begin the journey
Tell me your dates and what you are picturing, and I will come back within 48 hours with availability, an honest estimate, and the bluff, the tide and the backup I would point you toward. I book a wind alternative on every coastal day here rather than hoping, and it is inside the price.
The full Todos Santos companion is here, and the comparison with Los Cabos goes through the trade in detail. The Mexico guide puts the regions side by side, and you can write to me here.
Enquiries to the publisher, armanarai.com.