Bahía de Kino

Bahía de Kino is where Hermosillo goes for the sea. The town had about 6,050 people at the 2010 census, third in size within the municipality, and it comes in two halves. Kino Viejo, the original village, is where most residents live: fishing boats are launched straight off the beach, and the shops and simple seafood places are here. A couple of kilometers northwest, Kino Nuevo runs for roughly 11 km along the shore as a strip of beach houses, motels, RV parks and restaurants, with a sizeable community of American and Canadian residents.

The name honors the Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino, who landed here on June 19, 1685, with Isidro de Atondo y Antillón's expedition to the Californias and called it the bay of San Juan Bautista. This coast was, and remains, the land of the Comcaac, or Seri, hunter-gatherers and fishers who were never conquered by the Spanish. The present town began in the 1920s as a camp for totoaba fishermen. In 1922 an American, Yates Holmes, took a federal concession and built the Kino Bay Club, which lasted until 1931; a fishing cooperative followed in 1935, shark fishing for liver oil sold to the United States took off in the late 1930s, and the road from Hermosillo was paved in 1953. Totoaba was overfished and banned in 1975, and scallops, compressor diving and crab trapping took its place.

Fishing still makes up close to half of the local economy, and many families carve ironwood, the dense desert hardwood sold all over Sonora; buying carvings directly from Seri artisans is the way to get the real thing. Visitors come for the long, quiet beach at Kino Nuevo, for summer sunsets and for the islands. Isla Alcatraz, just offshore, is a protected bird island where landing is forbidden. Farther out lies Isla Tiburón, Mexico's largest island at about 1,200 km², an ecological reserve and Comcaac territory that can only be visited with permission from the Seri authorities in Punta Chueca, about 26 km up the coast by road. In Kino Viejo, the Museo Comcáac covers Seri history, basketry and the role of sea turtles in their life. Southeast of town, the La Cruz estuary, a Ramsar wetland, is good for kayaking, and a stand of cardón cactus grows by the highway on the way in.