The Arch of Cabo San Lucas

Mexico’s Baja California is the second-longest peninsula in the world and helps form the Gulf of California, one of the most biologically diverse seas on the planet. And they both terminate in the picturesque Arch of Cabo San Lucas.

Hugged by the Playa del Amor on the gulf side and the Playa del Divorcio on the ocean side, the limestone arch—known locally, and appropriately, as El Arco—was carved over millennia by the same winds and potent tidal forces that make swimming on the latter a potentially lethal and thus decidedly ill-advised proposition. The arch provides an attractive photo destination for visitors to nearby Cabo San Lucas. It also serves as a popular hangout for sea lions, who congregated at the spot long before Cabo became a whole thing.

Inaccessible by land, those keen to visit this tasteful piece of organic architecture should hail a boat taxi in Cabo San Lucas Marina and say, “Take me to Land’s End, please!,” which is another name for it. It has multiple names, but whichever one you choose, people will know what you’re talking about: that place where the land ends, in an “el arco,” near Cabo San Lucas.