About the project
By Mia Taylor
TheStreet
Coasting supine in a harness watching a vulture circle overhead and a brush-filled canyon pass by hundreds of feet below, I realized Los Cabos was not entirely what I’d expected.
For years I had seen pictures in gossip magazines of A-list celebrities and the world’s other fabulous and wealthy individuals frolicking here at this paradise’s many opulent beachside resorts.
The images always piqued my curiosity, leaving me wondering what this destination, which attracted so many luxury-seeking tourists, was truly like.
Hanging on a zipline 300 feet above ground, flying through desert canyons and passing frighteningly close to rock formations, was never among my glamorous mental images.
A few miles inland from the glittering resort and golf course-covered Los Cabos coast, Wild Canyon offers the opportunity to expand a typical beach getaway to include a day of exhilarating, if slightly unnerving, activity.
Ziplining is nothing new in a destination like Costa Rica or New Zealand. But Los Cabos never had the earthy, crunchy, rainforest filled image of Costa Rica or the mountainous paradise reputation of New Zealand.
And the ziplining experience wasn’t the only time I was pleasantly surprised by Los Cabos.
By many accounts, Los Cabos is 2016’s comeback kid. The destination was recently included on Robb Report’s annual list of the year’s hottest luxury destinations, a guide otherwise known as the ultimate insider’s peek at the places to be in 2016.
Los Cabos was among the destinations recognized by Robb Report as a comeback story, because on September 14, 2014, Hurricane Odile, a Category 4 storm, struck the region and wreaked widespread havoc. Many business and houses were heavily impacted and others completely destroyed. Wild Canyon park for instance suffered substantial damage and a few of its staff members lost their homes during the storm.
The first day after the storm, there was no power in Los Cabos, because about 500 power lines had been wiped out and only one radio station in the area was able to communicate with the outside world.
Within the next few days, however, federal and state support started pouring in. And with the help of the local, national and international community, Los Cabos recovered faster than expected, says says Eduardo Segura, a former member of the Los Cabos Tourism Board and current general manager of The Cape, a new boutique hotel. Locals, in particular, banded together in the days after the hurricane to get Los Cabos back on its feet.
“Everywhere you walked, you saw the population working,” recalls Segura. “In their homes, in the streets. Everybody was putting in effort to come back.”
The Mexican Tourism Board, meanwhile, spent $6.5 million on a marketing campaign called Los Cabos Unstoppable, to spread the word about the destination’s recovery.
All of the effort clearly paid off. Just three months after Odile, the destination had begun a substantial rebound, with the number of incoming tourists already at 40% of what it had been prior to the hurricane, Segura says.
Within eight months, 80% of the hotels had reopened.
The remaining hotels that waited a little longer to reopen, did so not because hurricane damage held them back, but because they took the opportunity to further enhance their facilities, says Segura.
“They decided to invest more money and improve,” says Segura. “Cabo has always been known as a high-end destination. But with the hurricane, everything was washed down and struck by the rain and winds. It was a perfect time for the destination to renew.”
Beyond just renewing, the destination is flourishing.
Over the next year or more, for instance, numerous new properties are scheduled to open including VieVage Los Cabos (an Auberge Resort), The Ritz-Carlton Reserve, Cachet Corazon, Villa Valencia, Nobu Hotel Los Cabos, Montage and Grand Solmar Rancho San Lucas.
And then there are properties like Hotel El Ganzo – another completely unexpected experience.
El Ganzo is the only hotel in Los Cabos, (and in Mexico for that matter), that has its own in-house recording studio that attracts musicians from around the world who come to create, collaborate and get inspired. The property’s music director jets in and out from Los Angeles, where he is scoping out the hottest talent for the property.
The boutique hotel also regularly hosts an artist in residence – painters, sculptors or other sorts – who are given free reign to create artwork in the public spaces.
One important point worth noting here is that Cabo is not Cancun. Cancun, with all its attractive offerings, has also become synonymous with hordes of tourists, mega malls, spring break central for the high school age and up crowd and nightclubs that stay open until sunrise.
Your first clue that Los Cabos is something different, more elegant, upscale, perhaps slightly more refined, begins when disembarking from the plane and queuing through customs. Look around you. The crowd is predominantly well-dressed adults carrying Louis Vuitton and Burberry bags, tennis rackets and golf clubs. There’s barely any teens in sight. Cabo is like spring break central for well-heeled adults ready to enjoy a sophisticated, very upscale backdrop.
“Los Cabos has always been a premium destination,” says Ricardo Orozco, vice president of operations for Solmar Group. “And all the work after the hurricane just reassured Cabo remains a top notch, exclusive and high-end destination.”
But with properties like Hotel El Ganzo, Cabo still offers that young-ish, cutting edge vibe, which is slightly unexpected.
If an artist’s loft were converted into a hotel, it would be something akin to the hip and chic El Ganzo. Everything about the hotel, which just reopened in November, oozes edgy, stylish cool. It is less old money luxury, more thirtysomething and living life with full appreciation of the world and all the textures, colors and music it has to offer.
At El Ganzo you’re likely to be sitting a breakfast next to the in-house musicians you saw on stage performing the night before and could very well bump into the artist in residence at work while strolling around the property.
“We are a comeback kid,” she adds. “We got wiped out by the hurricane. El Ganzo was completely closed down and evacuated.”
As Messerli talks, she pulls out her cell phone and begins swiping through images showing mountainous piles of building debris created by the hurricane. Yet looking around now, at the hotel, those images seem a world away.
One of the area’s newest restaurants meanwhile, Acre, looks as though it could have been airdropped from Los Angeles. Its stylish, dramatic design and décor seems to serve perfectly as a backdrop for attractive, fabulously dressed diners who happily fill every seat and table as dusk descends. (This was definitely the Los Cabos I had long imagined.)
Yet it too was surprising in some ways. Located in the middle of an oasis of palm trees, at the end of a dirt road on a 25-acre farm, the restaurant is home to a sprawling vegetable and herb garden and its menu is modern farm-chic meets global cuisine.
The restaurant’s chefs and management are said to be obsessed with using only those ingredients that are closest at hand – a combination of offerings from the property’s own farm and neighboring suppliers. The result is a vivid example of the emerging movement among restaurant’s these days to offer organic menus that also have a low carbon footprint.
In the end, perhaps the common theme in Los Cabos post Odile is a luxurious destination that is not squandering an opportunity (albeit delivered via a hurricane), to make itself even more of an experience for all of your senses, whether that be through ziplining or enjoying intriguing meals and cutting edge art.
Many area residents meanwhile, say they are merely happy the destination is back on its feet, not having lost any of the luster it had become so well known for and still attracting a steady, if increasing stream, of tourists.
“You feel happiness within the population because Cabo came back very fast and people really appreciate their work. They are satisfied with the big effort everyone put into coming back,” says Segura. “At the same time, what I see in the properties now is a new trend, new vibe, new sensation. For example, there are djs coming from New York, and artists from different areas. We have really good mixologists using roots and herbs from Mexico to do different drinks. Every aspect, even the architecture, has a new face.”
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