Three things opened in Los Cabos between the end of May and the end of August. A road, a hardware store and a Zara.
Individually, each got a day of coverage and disappeared. Together they are the most interesting thing to happen here in years, because not one of them is a hotel.
The road
On 25 May the Glorieta de las Mujeres Libres de Baja California Sur opened to traffic in San José del Cabo, ending more than a year of detours around one of the town’s worst intersections. President Sheinbaum inaugurated it remotely from the morning press conference.
The numbers the federal government put on it: a kilometre and a half of overpass, two lanes in each direction, around 700 million pesos, and delivery about six weeks ahead of contract. The claim attached to it was that queues of up to forty minutes would go away.
Anyone who drove that junction in February knows what forty minutes meant. What is worth noticing is who it was built for. Roughly 2.6 million visitors a year pass through, and the works were sold partly on tourist mobility — but the people who sat in that queue twice a day were the ones who live here, going to work.
The hardware store
On 20 August The Home Depot opened its first store in San José del Cabo — its second in the municipality, its third in Baja California Sur — on an investment the company put at 690 million pesos, taking its accumulated investment in the state past 950 million.
A hardware store is not glamorous and that is exactly why it matters. Nobody builds a fifty-thousand-product store for people who are here for six nights. They build it for contractors, for property managers, for the person whose air conditioning died in August, and for the thousands of houses going up behind the hotel zone. It is a bet on residents, placed with real money.
We have written before about what this coast does to a house. The short version is that everything here needs replacing sooner than it would anywhere else. A supply chain that finally assumes that is not a small change.
The Zara
On 31 July Inditex opened four of its brands at once — Zara, Zara Home, Massimo Dutti and Oysho — at Ánima Village, in Cabo del Sol, on the corridor between the two towns. Zara and Zara Home share a two-floor space; the other two have their own.
It is the group’s first presence in Baja California Sur. Until now the whole peninsula had Tijuana and nothing else.
Ánima itself is the larger story. Designed by Sordo Madaleno, it is around 22,000 square metres of leasable space laid out as terracotta pavilions and open plazas rather than a mall, with more than eighty brands planned as it fills through this year. Its first phase opened at the end of 2025.
What the three of them say together
Los Cabos has spent forty years building for people who leave. Rooms went from about fifteen thousand in 2016 to twenty-two thousand last year, some eighty per cent of them five-star. The airport now handles more than six hundred flights a week, three hundred and thirty of them from thirty-two cities in the United States.
That is a resort economy, and it works.
But an overpass, a hardware store and a high-street retailer are not resort infrastructure. They are town infrastructure. You build them when enough people are here on a Tuesday in September — when the construction workers who arrived to build the hotels stayed, brought their families, and started needing somewhere to buy a water heater and a school uniform.
That is the shift worth watching. Not that Los Cabos is getting more luxurious. That it is, slowly, becoming a place rather than a destination.
What is still coming
The luxury pipeline has not slowed, and the next eighteen months are heavy: Amanvari, Aman’s first property in Mexico, on the East Cape; the St. Regis at Quivira; a Grand Hyatt resort with a new Ernie Els golf course, billed as the brand’s first all-inclusive anywhere in the world; Soho House; and Conrad after that. Industry estimates put roughly nine hundred million dollars into luxury hotel infrastructure over three years.
Air connectivity keeps widening too. Condor’s direct from Frankfurt filled about seventy-three per cent of its seats in its second season, and the German market grew threefold between 2024 and 2025.
So both things are true at once. More rooms, more flights, more brands — and, for the first time in a while, more of the ordinary infrastructure that makes a town liveable for the people who staff all of it.
What we will be watching
Whether the roundabout holds up in high season, when the traffic it was built for actually arrives. Whether Ánima pulls the corridor’s centre of gravity away from both downtowns, and what that does to the businesses in them. And whether the next announcement is another resort, or another thing a resident needs.
We will keep count.
