Los Cabos Too Expensive? Elope in Todos Santos Instead
A resort town that works and a Pueblo Mágico with empty beaches. The comparison including the parts that favour Cabo.
Los Cabos delivers exactly what it promises. Big resorts, a busy marina, a golden arch at the tip of the peninsula, and everything working. It also delivers resort prices and resort crowds, and for a lot of couples the second half of that sentence is the problem.
An hour and a half up the Pacific side is Todos Santos, which is the opposite in almost every respect. Here is the honest comparison, including the parts that favour Cabo, because it is not a straight win for the prettier town.
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What Los Cabos is genuinely better at
Start here, because most comparisons skip it.
Access. The international airport is close, the roads are good, and your guests can get here without a plan. If anyone is flying in, this matters more than scenery.
Redundancy. When something falls through in Cabo there is another option twenty minutes away, at every price point, on demand. Todos Santos is a small town and it does not have that depth.
The water. The Sea of Cortez side is calm and swimmable and the Pacific side at Todos Santos largely is not. If being in the sea is part of the day you are picturing, Cabo wins that outright.
And the arch. Land's End is genuinely one of the great coastal formations anywhere, and Playa del Amor underneath it is boat access only, which makes it feel earned even in a busy town.
What Todos Santos is better at
It is a town rather than a destination. A Pueblo Mágico with a historic centre, galleries, a proper main square and people who live there. Cabo's centre was built for people arriving; Todos Santos was there first.
The beaches are empty. Not quieter. Empty. You can be the only people on a kilometre of Pacific sand on a Tuesday in February, which is not available at any price at the cape.
The light is better on the Pacific. Sunset over open water, every evening, straight into the lens. At the cape the geography puts the good light in more awkward places.
And it costs less on the ground. Food, rooms, everything.
The swimming problem, which decides it for some people
This is the single most practical difference and it is not obvious from photographs.
The Pacific beaches at Todos Santos are generally not safe for swimming. Strong swell, currents and undertow. La Cachora is a look-only beach. Punta Lobos is a working fishing beach where the boats launch through the break. Playa Los Cerritos is the exception and is the swim-friendly option in the area.
At the cape, the Sea of Cortez side is calm and the Pacific side, including Divorce Beach next to Lover's Beach, is not. Both towns have dangerous water. Cabo just has more of the safe kind.
If your picture of the day involves being in the ocean, that points at Cabo or at Cerritos specifically. If the ocean is scenery rather than an activity, Todos Santos gives you the better scenery with fewer people in it.
How the crowd actually differs
Worth being precise rather than sniffy about this.
Cabo is not uniformly crowded. The marina and the main beaches are, and twenty minutes inland or up the East Cape there is nobody. The crowd in Cabo is concentrated and avoidable if you know where not to be.
Todos Santos has a busy centre on market days and empty beaches almost always. The difference is that in Todos Santos you do not have to work at avoiding people, and in Cabo you do.
For an elopement that is worth something real, because the work of avoiding people is time that comes out of your day.
Where you actually stay, and what that does to the day
The accommodation shape is different in a way that changes the day itself, not just the invoice.
Cabo has everything, at every price, all year. Large resorts on the corridor between the two towns, small hotels, rentals. If eight people are coming and they all want something different, this solves itself.
Todos Santos has fewer rooms and they are smaller and generally nicer. Boutique places in the historic centre, a handful out toward the beach. They fill in the high season and there is no overflow twenty minutes away.
The practical consequence for the day: in Todos Santos you are ten minutes from your locations and in Cabo you are often forty. A resort on the corridor is not in either town. That is eighty minutes of a wedding day spent in a vehicle, and it is the most common way a Cabo day loses its best light.
As everywhere: I name the place and the arrival day, and you book it directly.
The two days, side by side
What each actually looks like from dawn, so you can picture it.
A Cabo day: early boat out to Land's End before the marina wakes up, with the arch and Lover's Beach while the water is flat. Back in for breakfast. Desert inland through the middle of the day when the light on water is gone. Ceremony late afternoon on the calm side, dinner somewhere with staff and a wine list.
A Todos Santos day: sunrise in the desert behind town with the cactus catching first light. The historic centre while it is still quiet, which is the frame Cabo cannot give you at all. The middle of the day indoors or inland. Then the ceremony on the Pacific at sunset, on sand with nobody on it, and the light coming straight in off the water.
The Todos Santos day has a better ending and the Cabo day has a better beginning. Which is another argument for doing both.
What it actually costs
My side does not change: the Baja Sur circuit is $10,000, and it covers everything I curate on the ground in either town or both.
Where the money genuinely differs is your side. Rooms and food in Todos Santos run meaningfully below the Cabo corridor, and a boat excursion at Land's End is a Cabo cost that does not exist up the coast.
Against that, Todos Santos means either a rental car or arranged transfers for the airport run each way, which Cabo largely removes.
Net, for two people, Todos Santos is the cheaper trip. For eight people with varied requirements, Cabo probably is, because the alternative is a logistics exercise in a town that does not have the rooms.
Getting between them, and the drive
The two towns sit roughly an hour and a half apart on a highway that crosses the peninsula through the desert, and the drive is genuinely pleasant rather than a chore.
If you base in Todos Santos you will do that drive twice, at each end, from the airport at Los Cabos. That is the real cost of choosing the quieter town, and for a short trip it is worth weighing: three hours of a four-day trip is not free.
If you base in Cabo and come up for the day, the drive eats the middle of your day, which is the part you would otherwise lose to bad light anyway. That is why the combined version works: you are driving during the hours when nothing photographs well regardless.
One practical note. A rental car makes the combined day much easier and gives you the desert stops on the way, which are some of the best frames of the trip and are not available if you are on arranged transfers running to a schedule.
The answer, and the version I usually build
Do not choose. That is the honest answer and it is also why Baja is sold as a circuit rather than a town.
They are an hour and a half apart. Sunrise on the calm side near the cape, the desert in the middle of the day when the light on water is useless, and sunset on the Pacific at Todos Santos. That is one day, it is not rushed, and it gives you both coasts and the desert.
If it genuinely has to be one base: Cabo if guests are coming or if swimming matters, Todos Santos if it is the two of you and you want the beaches empty. I have built both and neither couple regretted it.
The whole circuit is laid out in eloping on the Baja bluffs, the Mexican picture is in the Mexico elopement guide, the legal shortcut is in symbolic versus legal, and the price is on the pricing page.
