Diego and Valentino, two of San Juanico’s finest residents. Big changes are coming, though, and a mixed bag of emotions is bound to come with them. Photo: Haro
Scorpion Bay is – if you’re smart – on your surfing bucket list. It’s a beautiful place there in the heart of Baja, a tiny, dusty town sitting at the foot of a series of waves that, when they’re on, count among some of the best on Earth. But times are changing, and those changes are just around the corner. As of this writing, the town of San Juanico relies on solar and generators for electricity. The roads in are rough and broken.
It’s a sleepy place, full of friendly locals and quiet nights, but rumor has it that within the next few years, power lines will thread their way through that Mexican sky. The roads will be fixed. And, if history is anything to learn from, developments will spring up. For those of us who love the remoteness of places like San Juanico, that’s a tough pill to swallow. Especially tough for the traveling surfers from places just across the border, who’ve been making trips there for years and hold a special place in their hearts for SB.
The remoteness keeps the lineup relatively empty. It’s a strange thing, though, something tough to grapple with: the locals there — many of them, at least — want more people to come. They want the tourist dollars. They want reliable power. But as those things inevitably make their way to San Juanico, there’s a worry that it will lose the charm that people love about it.
I sat down at a wonderful little restaurant called El Burro Primavera (best micheladas I’ve ever had, and I’m a michelada snob) with a local surfer named Diego Yatnael Romero Suarez. I surfed with him a handful of times while I was there, and it’s clear that he grew up surfing some of the best waves in the world, because Diego surfs very, very well. Now, he splits his time teaching surfing in the tourist hub of Cerritos and then coming back home to San Juanico to reset and relax. As we spoke in the humid air, his dog Valentino lay at his feet, looking up at him every now and then just to make sure he was still there. Valentino is a very good boy.
He was born in Baja 23 years ago — actually in a town a few hours away from San Juanico called Constitution, as there’s no hospital in San Juanico. He surfed his first wave at seven years old, despite his mother’s reservations, asking tourists if he could borrow their surfboards when they weren’t using them, and began competing when he was 14.
“I really like it here, you know?” he told me, scratching Valentino behind his ears. “It’s crazy, because my family lived here for my whole life. I went to school here, and I learned the basics, but we didn’t learn English. I had time to surf all the time, hang out with my friends, go around the town… it was an easy life. Everything was super easy.”
But San Juanico is a tough place to eke out a living, so many people who live there need to leave to make money. Diego decided on Cerritos, because it’s relatively close and there are quite a few tourists there who need someone to teach them how to surf. Before that, though, he went to Ensenada for college, where he enrolled in oceanography. Before he could finish, though, COVID hit and he was forced to drop out. Over the course of his life, he’s seen his hometown gradually change. With a high likelihood of some very drastic changes in the near-future, I wondered what it like to watch a place you love grow into something that will probably be very different.
“I remember there were fewer people,” he told me. “The wave was different. It was better. We used to have a lot of sand, so the wave was breaking all the time at First Point and Second Point, even at high tide. The hurricanes have changed things. They remove all the sand from the points. There used to be maybe 600-800 people in the town. Now there’s more than a 1,000.”
While the prospect of getting electricity to the town isn’t entirely a sure-thing, Diego told me there’s probably an 80 percent chance of it happening in the next few years. He’s got mixed emotions about it, as you’d expect, but for the people who live there, he thinks it’s a great idea.
“I think it will be really good for everybody,” he said. “You know, my family, they need power. For keeping food cold. In the night in the summer, you need a fan. There are less opportunities for the people here without power. If you’re smart and you want to do something — make a business or something — it will be easier.”
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When I asked him about the fact that bringing electricity to the town will likely bring enormous changes like hotels, he thought for a second before answering. “Everybody comes here because it’s a small town. It’s quiet. You can feel the vibe here. It’s chill. But it will be very different. It will be a big change. We’ll have more people from everywhere. With no power, we have mostly surfers, but people who don’t surf will come if there is power.”
As I said, part of San Juanico’s immense charm is how sleepy it is. It’s almost silent, save for the buzzing of the cicadas and the tarantula wasps. Generators hum in the background occasionally, and a dirt bike buzzes by now and then, but for the most part, it’s filled with nature’s sounds. If or when more tourists come, Diego can see both sides of the coin.
“I’m a surfer,” he said. “I like it quiet. I like less people. Everybody hates when it’s crowded. But we’re still far from everything. It’s still hard to get to, but I think the power will be a really good thing for the people living here. You can be positive or negative about it. Americans are coming here now and building houses, because they have the money to do that. It’s really important that we build up the town in the right way.”
When I asked Diego what the general consensus of the locals’ feeling about it was, he answered quickly. “Probably 80 percent of the town wants the power. They need it… at some point I’d like to open a restaurant for my grandparents, and that will be a lot easier with power. Most people want it.”
Another issue with taking a trip to San Juanico is the simple act of getting there. For the most part, the road in is okay. It’s a stunningly beautiful drive from Loreto, cutting across Baja through mostly empty, catcus-strewn land. Mountains loom large, and the road winds its way through them. At some point, you hit a bridge that’s been out for what looks like years, so you need to cross a river. It’s not incredibly difficult, but it does require a vehicle with clearance. Apparently, that too will change.
The drive from Loreto to San Juanico is achingly beautiful. Photo: Haro
“If one day they build a new road, that’s going to be huge. Power and highway along the coast? Most people come from Loreto, but I’ve heard they’re going to build one up the coast. That would be the biggest change.”
All that, though, is an enormous undertaking. It will take years and millions of dollars. But in the end, it will benefit the people who live there, and they’re the ones who matter. I wrote a piece about San Juanico a few weeks ago, and as is generally the case, I was inundated with nasty messages because I was “blowing up a spot.”
Interestingly, though, most of the messages were from California surfers who’d been traveling there for years and felt as though they had some claim to the place. I can certainly see their point — and, in the selfish part of my brain, I agree with them. But the wants of a handful of travelers who only hope to keep the place empty so that they can surf very, very good waves with relatively few people in the lineup matter far less than the wants and needs of the people who actually live there.
So while it is a sad thing to some people that the sleepy little surf town of San Juanico will likely become quite a bit less sleepy in the coming years, if the majority of the people who call it home want it to happen, who are we to tell them it shouldn’t?
