El Vizcaino

The first efforts to protect the El Vizcaíno region go back to 1972, when the Mexican government decreed the first sanctuaries in the Ojo de Liebre and San Ignacio lagoons; the full reserve was declared in 1988 and its lagoons inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. At 25,000 km² it is the largest biosphere reserve in the whole of Latin America. Every winter, grey whales travel over 8,000 km from the Chukchi Sea in the Arctic to these shallow lagoons to mate and calve, in one of the great migratory feats of the animal kingdom; the species was brought to the brink of extinction by intensive 19th-century whaling, and its recovery in these Mexican waters is reckoned a global conservation success.