Los Cabos, Mexico

Los Cabos is two towns separated by twenty miles of resort corridor — and the twenty miles is the part most visitors should skip. San José del Cabo, at the eastern end, has an old town that predates the corridor by several hundred years: a grid of colonial streets, a church on a square, art galleries in buildings that have been here long enough to have a history. The art walk on Thursday evenings is a genuine local institution — not a tourist product. The East Cape, running north from the airport toward Los Barriles, is what happens when the desert meets the Sea of Cortez with almost no development between them: one of the longest and least photographed coastlines in Mexico, with the kind of quiet that requires a forty-minute drive to find.

The Pacific side has the surf — Zippers, Acapulquito, Old Man's, and a series of right-hand point breaks along the East Cape that work best in summer swell season. The Sea of Cortez on the other side has no surf and some of the clearest water in the world: whale watching from January through March, snorkelling year-round, mornings so quiet they feel like a different country. The yoga is hotel-programme territory rather than a dedicated scene, but Hotel El Ganzo's rooftop and Acre's open-air studio both run seriously enough to count. The food in San José's old town is the other reason to stay this end of the corridor — farm-to-table restaurants that have been quietly operating for a decade before the corridor caught up with the idea.