Los Cabos

Los Cabos is where this register learned to read a beach before reading a brochure. The beach and the twenty-metre federal zone behind it are inalienable federal property in Mexico; occupying them requires a written concession, and works that obstruct free passage are prohibited outright. What can be private is the land above that zone — and it is precisely that which makes a private beach look possible from the terrace.

Two of the houses along this shore market sand they cannot hold, and one of them does it on a beach the tourism board publishes as a public beach with a lifeguard and a car park. The register prints the state from the statute and the claim beside it, and it distinguishes the author: at a third address the phrase belongs to the developer of the surrounding community and not to the operator, whose own material says only that there is a stretch of beach and that it is swimmable.

What the houses here do hold is water of another kind. This is a coast of coves rather than a single strand, and the houses are strung along it far enough apart that each reads as its own address rather than as a row. The register notes for each what it verified — furniture and service standing on federal sand, which the law permits only under a concession — and notes that it inspected no concession title, rather than implying it holds them.

The season is the northern winter. No record on this page carries a published closing date, and the register leaves that as it is rather than reading an absent date as a house that never closes.