Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula:

Trailing south from California, to the Tropics of Cancer. An outpost of wild western Mexico, and promenading rocky landmass longer than Italy, a scarcely populated, remote world of fishing villages, mining towns and exotic hideaways.

Bookended by the luxurious resorts of Los Cabos on the southern tip, and Tijuana, the busiest border town on the face of the planet, at the northern perimeter with the United States.

Home to rattle snakes, spiders, scorpions, ostrich and coyotes. Land of cactus, palm tree, deserts, tropics, mountains and beaches. Coast to whales, dolphins, sharks, octopus and stingray. A tapestry of ecological diversity.

Baja California’s history is stained with enough drama and intrigue to mesmerize the most fidgety of classrooms.

Populated with pirates, tribes, explorers and thieves, heroes and villains, the land was mythologized and then ransacked, and then mythologized again.

The gripping stories played out on this strip of magical land, have the colorful vibrancy of a boy scout’s pop-up book.

Stories rooted further back in history than the arrival on the East Coast, and subsequent spread across North America by the British. California was alive and bustling with European trade and trouble hundreds of years before.

The conquistadors interrupted the isolated development of indigenous tribes, who had fashioned a culture and belief system from their environment. For a while the Peninsula then became a strategic strip of land, that was fought for, first between the natives and the invaders, and then again with the north, before eventually being forgotten and left to blossom again, slowly in peace. A wild strip of untamed land.

Even today, as world travelers flock to Baja to soak up its extravagant beauty and potentially disrupt this lull, Mexicans’ on the mainland, still treat their peninsula appendage like a remote settlement with mystical power.