Loreto Feels Like the Ultimate Baja Getaway - Pt 4
By Tom Kagy | 23 Feb, 2025

The most memorable thing about Loreto are the primordial colors that dominate the scenery.

To my mind Loreto is as much a visual aesthetic and a state of mind as a place.   Its vistas continue to linger in my mind's eye long after each visit.

There is, first, the sapphire sea.  It's not just the preternaturally deep dark blue of the water on clear sunny days (which is probably 95% of all days).  It's the stillness, as though the sea isn't water but actually a giant sapphire.  The stillness makes the darkness of the blue sublime when contrasted against the red of the rocky islands and mountains plunging into the sea.

One of the best places to enjoy this sublime vista is from the 7-mile-long hiking trail that rings Villa del Parmar.  Another is a vista point about halfway between Parmar and the town.  Yet another is from the mountains that rise to the west, accessible via the John Steinbeck trail.  The author of Grapes of Wrath too had found the sea striking:

“Below the Mexican border the water changes color," Steinbeck wrote in The Log from the Sea of Cortez, an account published in 1951 of a 6-week Baja expedition he made in 1941 with marine biologist bud Ed Ricketts.  "It takes on a deep, ultramarine blue—a washtub bluing blue, intense and seeming to penetrate deep into the water; the fishermen call it ‘tuna water.’”

During their stay in the Loreto area they moored in Puerto Escondido, about eight miles north of Danzante Bay.  At the suggestion of locals Steinbeck and Ricketts hiked up a rugged ravine cut by a steep stream.  Today both the canyon and the trail they hiked now bear Steinbeck's name.  Steinbeck would memorialize his overnight stay in the canyon as a place of "palm trees and wild grapevines and large ferns, and the water was cool and sweet."

The stark beauty of that dry rugged stretch of Baja left an impression on Steinbeck as indelible as it has on me.  

“Trying to remember the Gulf is like trying to re-create a dream," he wrote years later, near the end of his life.  "[I]t is fierce and hostile and sullen. The stone mountains pile up to the sky and there is little fresh water. But we must go back if we live, and we don’t know why.”

Steinbeck never did return before his death in 1968.  But other Americans still share his love for Baja, especially Loreto.  Their odd presence is felt in conversations overheard in Loreto's plazas and cafes.  The heart of Americanness, aside from Parmar, are a couple of modern seaside developments at and near Puerto Escondido, which boasts a modern marina and a trailer park.  This is where North Americans (the umbrella term preferred by the many Canadians who also live there) escape winters and enjoy a lifestyle not possible in the congestion and traffic of modern life elsewhere in North America.