Loreto Feels Like the Ultimate Baja Getaway - Pt 2
By Tom Kagy | 19 Feb, 2025

The islands accessible from the little Port of Loreto provide access to secluded white-sand beaches and snorkeling among noisy and curious sea lions.

Once we had our fill of resort luxury and ease, we turned onto Highway 1 for a day's outing to the north end of my Loreto axis.  Loreto proper is home to 16,000 souls populating about three dozen blocks of shops, restaurants, plazas, promenade, and small-town amenities like pharmacies that sell stuff like Ivermectin that require prescriptions in the US.  A key Loreto feature is a charming little marina offering boat excursions to the memorable islands of Loreto Bay National Park, Mexico's biggest national marine preserve.  

Our boat was crewed by a male captain and a female guide who spoke excellent English to serve our family of eight.  The excursion began with an hour's jaunt out toward the west coast of the northern end of Isla Carmen.  We anchored off a pristine white-sand beach and jumped ashore, trying to avoid dipping our feet in a thin layer of red tide caused by a bloom of red algae.  My feet did touch the red-tinged water but I never experienced the itching that our tour operator warned us against. 

The island is big, about  17 miles north-south and 4 miles wide at the widest part of its northern end.  Its main attractions are many secluded coves and the ruins of what was once the world's biggest salt mine operation alongside a pink salt lake.  Weather moving slowly in from the north forced us to scrap plans to motor around the north end of Isla Carmen to a bay on its eastern side from which to access the mine road.

<img src="https://goldsea.com/uploads/CoronadoSeaLions.jpg">

Sea lions frolic off a rocky cove on Coronado island.

Instead we headed back northwest across ten miles of perceptibly roughening sea to Coronado Island.  Coronado is shaped like George Washingon's bust (he's looking left, west toward the mainland).  It's about a mile and a half high by about two miles wide at its base, a tiny fraction of the land area of Carmen.  What Coronado lacks in size, it more than makes up with pristine, secluded, essentially private white-sand beaches that look like they belong in Thailand or Tahiti, not the Bay of California.

But before settling on a beach for a leisurely lunch, we stopped at a rocky cove that attracts hundreds of sea lions so we could invade their territory with some snorkeling.  These creatures give off a powerful stench and are noisy, regularly emitting choruses of big-dog yelps, only louder and deeper.  The boat maneuvered to a position upwind of the sea lion colony to spare our nostrils. 

Being late December the water temperature was 69 degrees.  With a wetsuit on I was able to feel comfortable a few minutes after slipping into the chilly water.

The natural trepidation at being surrounded by sleek black mammals that can swim circles around me faded gradually as I saw that the sea lions were as curious and wary as I was.  At time my view of the critters was veiled by shimmering screens of thousands of tiny silver anchovies moving around the cove like drapery in a breeze.  It was a feast for the senses, and I felt a bit like an animated character in some Disney undersea adventure.

After less than a quarter hour in the water we were ready for a white-sand beach on which to warm up.  In a few minutes we circled around from the rocky side to Coronado's sunny, sandy side and dropped anchor on a picture-perfect beach lapped by  aqua waters.  The only other people on the beach, a couple and their boat crew, left by the time we were done with our surprisingly tasty lunch of vegetarian burritos.  When I tired of gently roasting in the sun I scrambled around the volcanic-rock-encrusted terrain, enjoying the sense of being on a desert isle — which Coronado would be but for occasional tourists like us.

By the time we hoisted anchor for the 20-minute trip back to Loreto the approaching weather had raised the waves, giving us a jouncy ride punctuated frequently by hard slaps from the deeper troughs.  The resounding silence that follows a cabin-cruiser ride was welcome.  But the outing was a nice changeup of perspective: rather than enjoying the view from the land out, we had briefly entered the seascape.