Marina Cabo San Lucas

A Government Harbour, Not a Private Development

Before 1974 there was no harbour here, only a mudflat and a small airstrip at the tip of the Baja peninsula. FONATUR, the same federal agency that built Cancun from nothing, dredged the basin and created the sheltered water that the town's whole tourist economy now sits around. IGY Marinas holds the concession to run the 380-slip marina inside it through a local entity, Cabo Marina, and has built the operation into the only marina in Mexico carrying 5 Gold Anchors from The Yacht Harbour Association, a rating IGY says it has now held for eight consecutive years.

That government ownership is not a historical footnote, because the concession itself is periodically renewed, and the renewal is not automatic. The basin sits inside a natural amphitheatre formed by the Pedregal headland, which is what makes the water calm enough to berth a 375 ft yacht a few hundred metres from a fish taco stand. But the land under the marina, and the water rights over the basin, belong to the Mexican state, and whoever operates the marina does so at the state's pleasure. In April 2024, that arrangement stopped being theoretical.

The Takeover the Website Does Not Mention

IGY's local operator, Cabo Marina, filed a concession renewal on 21 March 2024. ASIPONA, the federal port administration, rejected it. The following day, Mexican Navy personnel, municipal police and ASIPONA staff took physical control of the marina. Gates were briefly chained. Water, electricity and fuel-dock service were cut for roughly a day, according to a first-hand account from Mar Vida Sportfishing, a local charter operator on site at the time. MarineMax, which had acquired IGY Marinas in 2022, called the action illegal in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission dated 17 April 2024. Kitty McGowan, president of the U.S. Superyacht Association, told Boat International at the time that the marina was refusing new dockage requests but honouring bookings already made.

The gates reopened. What is genuinely unclear, because no source found states it plainly, is whether the underlying concession dispute was ever formally resolved or whether IGY is simply operating again under some unannounced interim arrangement. An ASIPONA statement in August 2025 announced a new security investment at the port, hiring at least 20 private guards and modernising CCTV and lighting, which reads as the port authority acknowledging problems of its own rather than as evidence the dispute is settled. A Cabos Finest report from May 2026 still names IGY as the operator. A buyer or captain planning to base here for a season should ask IGY directly what the current legal status of the concession is, in writing, rather than assume the marina's own site would say if anything were still unresolved.

In April 2024 the Mexican Navy, municipal police and the port authority took physical control of the marina from its operator for a day. IGY's own marketing reads as if it never happened.

What a Season Costs, and Why No One Will Tell You in Advance

There is no public rate sheet. IGY's standard practice, confirmed on its own site, is to quote by email or phone on request rather than publish a table the way ACI does in Croatia or Port Hercule does in Monaco. The closest thing to a hard number is a first-hand account from the cruising blog s-v Sonrisa, which paid over USD 100 a night for its own boat in 2020, and a 2026 estimate from the real-estate site Cabos Finest that a 60 ft sportfisher in peak season, November to April, runs several hundred dollars a night. Neither figure is current pricing for every length of boat, and both should be read as evidence of a high-price marina rather than a quote you could hold IGY to.

Annual berths are reported to be scarcer still. A charter operator's social media post cites a three-year waitlist for a permanent slip; Cabos Finest separately, and not identically, describes annual contracts as rarely available at all. Fuel is sold on site, both gasoline and diesel, at a price nobody publishes; Mexican marine fuel generally runs about a dollar a gallon over San Diego prices, which is the only number available to plan around. The one utility structure that is public is metering by amperage tier, 30A, 50A and 100A single-phase or 100A three-phase, which at least tells a buyer the marina prices power by draw rather than folding it into a flat berth fee the way Split does.

Clearing In, and What the Paperwork Actually Involves

Cabo San Lucas carries its own Immigration, Customs, Port Captain and Port Authority offices in town, which makes it a genuine port of entry rather than a marina that leans on paperwork done somewhere else. A first-hand clearance account from s-v Sonrisa in November 2020 lays out the actual sequence: a health inspection so the Port Captain can issue a despacho, a visit to Immigration on Lazaro Cardenas for crew visas, the Port Captain's own office on Calle 16 de Septiembre to pay vessel fees, and a call at the API port authority near Senor Frog's for a daily harbour fee. A ship's agent can do this for you and most cruising guides describe one as optional rather than mandatory, but the Port Captain's office keeps weekday hours only, so arriving on a weekend means waiting.

Every foreign-flagged vessel staying beyond a short grace period needs a Temporary Import Permit, the TIP, and the original document has to stay aboard the whole time it is in Mexican waters, not just at clearance. Beyond that national process, no rule specific to Cabo San Lucas itself turned up in any source checked. The practical planning point is timing: Bisbee's Black and Blue tournament, one of the richest marlin tournaments in the world at over USD 6.8 million paid out to 174 teams in 2024, runs out of Puerto Paraiso next to the marina every October and is reported to bring genuine gridlock to the basin. A visiting yacht with no reason to be part of it should plan its arrival around that week, not into it.

The Pedregal Headland Does Not Stop Everything

The rock amphitheatre that makes this harbour photogenic is also what IGY's marketing leans on to describe the anchorage as protected. Most of the time it is. On 3 September 2025, heavy rain bands and long-period swell from Tropical Storm Lorena, forecast at 15 to 20 ft on Pacific-facing shores by the US National Hurricane Center, pushed mud and debris into the port and flipped or grounded a number of small vessels and yachts along the marina waterfront, reported by The Cabo Sun the following day citing Mexico's own national weather service. No injuries were reported. It was not the first time; general swell exposure inside the basin, despite the headland, is flagged independently by both PredictWind's own facility notes and by Cabos Finest, which both advise tying up to account for surge even in ordinary conditions.

None of this makes Cabo San Lucas an unusually dangerous marina by Pacific-Mexico standards, and the basin has taken far worse storms without this kind of damage. What it does mean is that a boat left unattended here through the June-to-November tropical storm season is not in a marina that can be treated as fully sheltered simply because the headland is there. An owner planning to leave a boat on the hard or in a slip through hurricane season should ask IGY directly what storm plan the marina actually runs, since nothing on this point is published either.

What Is Genuinely Next Door

Puerto Paraiso Entertainment Plaza, roughly 50,000 square metres of shops, bars and restaurants across three floors, sits directly on the marina and stays open into the night; Lorenzillo's, Solomon's Landing and Baja Brewing Company are the names most cited by tourism guides as the marina-front regulars. Amerimed Hospital, rebranded Hospiten Cabo San Lucas, is about a mile away with 24-hour emergency care and bilingual staff; a second hospital, H Plus, sits closer to the airport for anyone landing or departing in a hurry. Los Cabos International Airport, SJD, is roughly 45 km and a 40 to 50 minute drive away, with private transfers quoted from about USD 99 to 220 a vehicle and a shared shuttle nearer USD 20 to 30 a person.

For anything mechanical, Mario's Marine on Calle 16 de Septiembre is the chandlery named in local listings; a fuller-stocked yard and chandlery sits about 30 minutes away at Puerto Los Cabos in San Jose del Cabo. None of that is unusual for a resort marina, and none of it changes the two facts that actually distinguish this one: the price of a berth is whatever IGY quotes you in an email, and the state that owns the harbour has shown once, in living memory, that it is willing to walk in and take it back.

Pour qui: An owner who wants to be inside the loudest, most walkable marina in the Sea of Cortez, minutes from a world-class sportfishing fleet and a downtown that never really closes, and who is prepared to accept published rates that do not exist and a concession dispute IGY has not fully explained, rather than an owner who wants a quiet season base with predictable paperwork.