In 1990 about forty thousand people lived in Los Cabos. Today it is more than three hundred and fifty thousand.
Nothing about that is normal. The municipality grew 140 per cent in the nineties, 126 per cent in the following decade, and another 47 per cent between 2010 and 2020. Cabo San Lucas nearly tripled in ten years. San José nearly doubled.
Here is the number that reframes every argument this town has with itself: 55.8 per cent of the people who live here were born in another Mexican state. Around five per cent were born in another country. Add them together and roughly six in ten people in Los Cabos arrived from somewhere else.
The waiter, the developer, the retiree, the mason, the real estate agent, the woman who runs the fonda — most of them are, in the only sense that matters here, newcomers. Nobody has standing to tell anybody else they got here late.
Two arrivals
The first is the larger by an order of magnitude. People came from Guerrero, Sinaloa and Estado de México — those three alone account for about half of all interstate arrivals — and from Oaxaca, Chiapas, Veracruz and everywhere else work was thinner than it was here. They came because a destination was being built and building it takes hands. They stayed, brought their families, and became the operational base of everything: the kitchens, the sites, the housekeeping, the boats, the vans, the gardens.
The second is smaller and far more visible. Around seventeen thousand foreign nationals live in Los Cabos — roughly five per cent of the population, more than ten thousand of them from the United States, with Canadians the next largest group. Americans make up something like three per cent of the town. Many are retired. Many are here part of the year and elsewhere the rest of it. A good number own property, and some own several.
They arrived in the same decades, drawn by the same fact: this was one of the few places in North America where something new was being made.
What each one actually brings
The foreign resident community brings money that does not depend on the season, which in a tourism economy is worth more than it sounds. It pays for the dentists, the vets, the gyms, the language schools, the imported groceries, the private clinics and the service businesses that a purely seasonal town could never sustain. It underwrites a level of infrastructure — medical, commercial, aeronautical — that three hundred thousand people of average Mexican income would not, on their own, attract.
The Mexican migrant community brings the entire operating system. Nothing here runs without it, and it is also, quietly, the reason the food got good: people arrived carrying culinary traditions older and deeper than the peninsula’s own, and started cooking.
Both groups are, in the plainest terms, why Los Cabos exists in its current form. Neither is a guest of the other.
Where the friction actually is
It is not culture. It is housing, and the numbers are not comfortable.
Los Cabos leads Mexico’s tourist markets in house price growth, with reported annual increases around 13 to 14 per cent, driven substantially by foreign investment and second-home buying. Nationally, the average home passed two million pesos for the first time in early 2026, and by one estimate only about two per cent of formal workers earn enough to finance an average home.
Those are national figures for wages and a local figure for prices, which is precisely the problem. The price of a house here is being set in dollars and the wage that has to reach it is being paid in pesos.
That is what pushes the people who staff the resorts further and further out — into colonias with thinner water, thinner drainage and longer commutes, on a peninsula where water was never abundant to begin with. The pressure is real, it is measurable, and it is not solved by anybody being nicer to anybody.
Is that gentrification?
The word arrives with a verdict already attached, which is why it is not very useful here.
Gentrification, strictly, is displacement: existing residents priced out of the place they already lived. Los Cabos is a stranger case. There was very little here to displace — forty thousand people in 1990 — and almost everyone doing the pricing out and almost everyone being priced out arrived in the same thirty years. It is less a neighbourhood being taken over than a city being built at two speeds at once, with the fast lane paid in one currency and the slow lane in another.
That is not a defence. A family paying half its income for a room in a colonia without reliable water does not care what the process is called. But naming it accurately matters, because the cure for displacement and the cure for a two-currency housing market are not the same policy.
Can they hold together?
They already are. That is the part the argument keeps missing.
The relationship is not oil and water — it is a supply chain that happens to be staffed by one group and largely paid for by the other, and both halves know it. The resident from Calgary has a plumber he trusts and would be lost without. The plumber has a client list of foreign homeowners that lets him charge properly, hire two people, and buy a truck. That is not exploitation and it is not charity. It is a market, and on the whole it is a functioning one.
Where it strains is where markets always strain: at the things nobody owns. Water. Roads. Drainage. Schools. Housing for people who earn pesos. Those are not fixed by goodwill between neighbours; they are fixed by public investment and by developers being required to build for the workforce as well as for the buyer.
A thing worth saying plainly
Mexico has always been glad to receive people. That is not a slogan, it is a habit — one this country has kept up through periods when the courtesy was not returned. The Canadian who has wintered in San José for twenty years is not a problem to be managed. Neither is the family from Guerrero who arrived in 2009 and now owns the taquería that everyone on the block eats at.
Both of them are locals now. The word is not as narrow as people use it.
Now tell us we are wrong
We are a small editorial team with a point of view, and this is a subject where somebody living it will always know more than somebody writing about it.
So: if you moved here from Sinaloa in 2011, or bought a house in Pedregal in 2004, or grew up here and watched all of it happen — we would like to hear how this reads from where you are standing. Agreement is welcome. Disagreement is more useful.
Write to the editors, directly. We will publish the responses worth publishing, including the ones that tell us we got it wrong.
