“Someone has left a single flip-flop on the median strip of the Transpeninsular Highway, and it stays there for three days like a small monument to vacation surrender.”

The cab from San José del Cabo airport takes maybe twelve minutes, but the landscape changes three times. First the scrubby desert hills with their cardón cactuses standing like tall, confused pedestrians. Then the commercial sprawl — a Costco, a Home Depot, a string of pharmacies selling things you don't need a prescription for — and then, suddenly, the hotel corridor along the coast, where the Pacific side gives way to the Sea of Cortez and everything gets louder and bluer at the same time. The driver has the radio tuned to something with a lot of tuba. He points left toward the water without looking. "Riu," he says, the way you'd say "obvious."

He's not wrong. The Riu Santa Fe sits on the beachfront stretch between Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo — the corridor the locals call the Tourist Corridor with zero irony — and it makes no effort to hide what it is. This is a big, all-inclusive resort. The lobby smells like coconut sunscreen and floor cleaner. There are wristbands. There is a guy playing "Despacito" on a marimba near check-in. You either make peace with this in the first five minutes or you don't, and honestly, making peace with it is the better move.

The pool situation and other negotiations

What defines the Riu Santa Fe isn't the room — it's the ecosystem. The property sprawls across enough real estate that you can walk ten minutes from one pool to another and feel like you've changed neighborhoods. There's a main pool with a swim-up bar that operates on the social physics of a college cafeteria: the closer to the bar, the louder the music, the more likely someone is doing a cannonball. Further out, there are quieter pools where people read actual books. Your wristband also gets you into the two sister resorts next door — the Riu Palace and the Riu Baja California — which means you can pool-hop like a bar crawl, except horizontal and with more SPF.

The rooms are clean, functional, and exactly what you'd expect from a large chain resort that renovates on a cycle. Ours had a balcony facing the ocean, which sounds better than it is — the view is genuinely beautiful, all that impossible turquoise, but the waves here are rough and the red flags are up more often than not. Swimming in the sea is mostly theoretical. The bed was firm. The air conditioning was aggressive. The minibar restocked itself daily with beer and water, which felt like a small daily kindness. One thing: the walls are not thick. We could hear our neighbors' alarm at 6:30 AM every morning. They were early-pool people. We were not.

The food situation is better than the all-inclusive reputation suggests, though you have to be strategic. There are multiple restaurants — a Japanese place called Kulinarium, a steakhouse, an Italian, a Mexican spot, and a massive buffet that serves everything and nothing simultaneously. The Japanese restaurant is the one to book early; it fills up fast, and the tuna was genuinely good. The Mexican restaurant does a solid enchilada suiza. The buffet is fine for breakfast — the chilaquiles are reliable, the coffee is weak, and there's a man who makes omelets with the quiet focus of a surgeon. I watched him crack maybe forty eggs in twenty minutes without breaking a yolk. That kind of commitment deserves recognition.

“The desert doesn't care about your wristband. Step off the resort grounds and it's right there — dry, ancient, indifferent — reminding you that this whole coast was empty not that long ago.”

The drinks are all-inclusive strong, which is both the promise and the warning. The bartenders at the beach bar pour with a generosity that borders on philosophical. Stick to the margaritas and the micheladas — the cocktail menu gets ambitious in places the execution can't quite follow. The beach itself is wide, dramatic, and mostly for looking at. The undertow is serious. Lifeguards blow their whistles with the frequency of a referee at a children's soccer match.

If you want to leave the resort — and you should, at least once — a cab to downtown San José del Cabo runs about $14 and drops you at the art district near Galería de Ida Victoria, where the Thursday Art Walk fills the streets with people, mezcal samples, and dogs wearing bandanas. The town is quieter and older than Cabo San Lucas, with a church on the main plaza and taco stands that don't need a wristband to justify their existence. Try the fish tacos at Tacos Gardenias on Calle Doblado. They cost almost nothing and they're perfect.

Walking out into the morning

On the last morning, I walk past the pool before it fills up. The marimba guy isn't here yet. A maintenance worker is skimming leaves off the water with the slow patience of someone who does this every day before anyone notices. Beyond the pool, beyond the beach, a pelican drops into the sea like a bag of rocks and comes up with breakfast. The desert hills behind the resort are turning gold in the early light. A shuttle to the airport leaves from the lobby every hour. The 6 AM one is quiet. Everyone on it is sunburned and half-asleep, clutching souvenir bags, already somewhere between here and home.

Rooms at the Riu Santa Fe start around $258 per night for two adults, all-inclusive — which means every margarita, every omelet, every cannonball splash is already paid for. Whether that math works depends entirely on how many pools you plan to visit before noon.