Welcome to the Hotel California

Friday, February 13, 2026

Todos Santos is about an hour and a quarter’s drive north of Cabo San Lucas, on the Pacific Coast of Baja California Sur. It is a Magical Town. I say that because it has been designated as a Pueblo Magico by the Mexican government based on its cultural, historical, and natural richness. This program was created to promote tourism in smaller towns. There are now over 177 Pueblos Magicos in Mexico. These towns receive government funding for beautification, infrastructure, and marketing. I think it’s a brilliant idea. If I had a choice between going to a Magical Town and an ordinary town, I would definitely lean toward the Magical Town.

That being said, I wasn’t enchanted by Todos Santos. Read on to find out why.

We took a tour (through HAL). One of the biggest selling points of the tour was a visit to the Hotel California — the one in the song. We have visited Cabo numerous times over the years and we have always heard that the “original” Hotel California was not far away. This time our cruise package included excursion credit, so we decided the tour to Todos Santos would be a nice excursion and we could get to see the famous hotel.

The night before the tour I was thinking about the song and trying to understand the lyrics. I ended up googling it, and what I found convinced me that the hotel in Todos Santos was NOT the hotel in the song. The song is about the L.A. music industry. It was too late to cancel the trip, and I hoped Todos Santos and its hotel might still be worth seeing.

I was not impressed with HAL’s clumsy system for getting passengers ashore via tender and onto their motorcoaches. It took 90 minutes from the time we were told to meet in the auditorium until we had boarded our coach. 

Inside the tender

There seemed to be strong interest in this tour. I think there were three or four coaches. On the bus, our guide told us we would be stopping for lunch at 9:45. Nobody was happy to hear that. He said they had to stagger the lunches and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He laid out the plan for the day. We would go to lunch, then we would walk over to a Jesuit mission, then we would go to the Hotel California where we could participate in a tequila tasting or go shopping and then we would meet at the hotel and board the bus to go back.

The scenery on the drive was very interesting. There were lots of cacti and I quite enjoyed looking at them. The guide said these cacti are called cardon; they are not saguaro. Taking photos of the cacti is strangely addictive. I have so many more I’d like to share . . .

We arrived in Todos Santos and stopped at a small museum that used to be a school. We saw some huts that represented the typical housing for farm workers (rancheros) in the past. We also saw stone tools made by indigenous people before the arrival of Europeans.

Stone tools

Ranchero kitchen

Ranchero hut

I think the guide said this depicts the traditional women’s dress in this region

We were taken to a restaurant about two blocks away for lunch. By the time we got there, it was about 10:45, so they must have taken us to the museum first and pushed the lunch back by an hour. The lunch was okay. We had two kinds of enchilada and a banana tamale. The tamale was like a cakey pudding inside, but it was okay.

I never saw the other buses. I have no idea where they went. The lunch was okay, but we were led to believe we would have lunch at the Hotel California, and we didn’t.

Our group walked over to the former Jesuit mission. The guide didn’t really say much about it.

 

Inside the church

Outside the church

There were some interesting sculptures around the outside, made from bits of scrap metal. I don’t know whether they were for sale or were permanent installations, but I felt they might have been for sale.

Next we go to the hotel and things start to unravel. 

We had to walk through a shop and out the back to reach a courtyard. There was a bar there where the tequila tasting would take place. I really didn’t know whether it was part of the hotel or not. By the time Ken and I got there, all the seats were taken. There were a couple of bartenders already pouring out small shots and talking about the tequila. I tried to stand there and watch, but I couldn’t get close enough to hear, and they didn’t seem inclined to give me a taste. I asked the guide if they could get more chairs for us, and he said they would be done soon and then we could have a seat. We waited a few minutes but nobody left, so we left. A tequila tasting might be a little bit fun in a group, but I didn’t think it would be fun on our own after everyone else was done.

Art in the courtyard

It’s beadwork!

I decided to walk around and look at the hotel, but I couldn’t really tell where the lobby was. There was the shop we walked through and there was a coffee shop. There was something that might have been the front desk in the coffee shop, but nobody was there and there was no signage suggesting it was where to check in.

Is this the front desk?

There is one geocache in the central part of Todos Santos and I wanted to try to get it since I had nothing else to do while the others were tasting tequila. I figured out that the geocache was in a bar across the street from the hotel, and someone else had logged it yesterday. So I went to the bar and walked in to take a look and see if I could spot it. A man who looked like he might be the owner came up to me and asked if he could help me. I said I was looking for the geocache. He pretended he didn’t know what it was and then suddenly remembered and he said it wan’t there any more. I knew he was lying, but there was nothing I could do. One of the rules of geocaching is that you don’t geocache on private property without the owner’s permission, and I clearly didn’t have permission.

I saw the guide a little later and I asked him if he could show me the hotel lobby. He spoke to someone in Spanish and then he told me the hotel had been sold and it was closed. I thought he was lying. He did not say anything about being able to see the lobby. I was pretty disgusted.  I should have gone and said something at the excursion desk when I got back to the ship, but I was still pissed off at how condescending they were about the catamaran, and I just didn’t want to have to deal with them. That’s probably why they are that way - to wear you down. I am so tired of dealing with assholes and liars. This is not what I want to do on my vacation.

Now here is the postscript. When I finally sat down to write about this excursion, I looked up the hotel to see if it has really been sold. Apparently it was sold in January and is now closed indefinitely for extensive renovation. It is unclear whether it will reopen as a hotel. So, the guide wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t sharing everything he knew, either.

One explanation for all of this might be that here is another cultural lesson. If things don’t work the same way in Mexico, get over it. They are over it.

Here is what we saw when we got back on our ship and we started to sail out of the harbor. Magical!

Today’s fabric is “Retro Cactus Mirage” by naisnicolas for Spoonflower.