Loreto Bay

Bahía de Loreto National Park was decreed in 1996 on the eastern coast of Baja California Sur, off the town of Loreto, first capital of the Californias. It protects a sector of the Gulf of California that includes five main islands — Coronado, del Carmen, Danzante, Monserrat and Santa Catalina — together with the waters around them and a stretch of mainland coast.

The islands are arid, of abrupt relief and desert vegetation with columnar cacti, and some hold endemic reptiles and plants peculiar to each island, the result of prolonged isolation. Off them, the bathymetry drops away rapidly towards the deep basins of the gulf, and that contrast between shallow and deep water, together with nutrient upwellings, generates very high marine productivity.

That richness supports one of the most notable concentrations of marine mammals in the gulf: some thirty cetacean species have been recorded in the park, among them the blue whale, which uses these waters as a wintering and calving ground, the fin whale — with a population resident in the gulf, which is exceptional for the species — and several species of dolphin, alongside colonies of California sea lion. Traditional inshore fishing is still practised under regulation within the park, and Bahía de Loreto forms part of the World Heritage property Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California.