Cabo Pulmo

Cabo Pulmo National Park was decreed on 5 June 1995 on the eastern coast of the Baja California peninsula, between Punta Pulmo and Cabo Los Frailes, some hundred kilometres north of Cabo San Lucas. It protects 71.11 km² of sea and coast around Pulmo bay, where the oldest of the only three living coral reefs on the west coast of North America is found, and the northernmost in the whole eastern Pacific. Its age is estimated at some 20,000 years and it holds eleven coral species.

Its international fame comes from an unintended conservation experiment. By the late 1980s intensive fishing had stripped the reef almost bare. The local community of Cabo Pulmo itself, which lived from that fishing, pushed for the park to be declared and agreed to stop fishing, turning instead to dive tourism and applying strict community enforcement. A decade later the fish biomass had multiplied spectacularly, with increases that scientific studies put in the hundreds of per cent, the fastest recovery documented in a marine reserve anywhere in the world. The case is routinely cited as proof that marine protected areas work when the community is behind them.

Its reefs are home to 226 of the 875 reef species recorded in the Gulf of California, with aggregations of bull shark, large groupers, jacks and manta rays, and the beaches are a nesting ground for marine turtles. Cabo Pulmo forms part of the World Heritage property Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California, inscribed in 2005, and has been a Ramsar site since 2 February 2008. The park has withstood several attempts at mass tourist development around it, halted by public mobilisation and by environmental rulings.