Golfo de Santa Clara

El Golfo, as people in San Luis Río Colorado call it, sits right where the Colorado River fans out into its delta and the Sea of Cortez begins, which is why locals nickname it Mexico's armpit. It had 4,618 residents at the 2020 census and lives mostly from small-boat fishing: Gulf corvina, shrimp, sierra mackerel, sharks and rays. In April 2026 the Sonora government launched a pilot program here to buy up to 1,000 tonnes of corvina and pay some 200 fishermen in cash at the moment of the catch.

The name goes back a long way. In the autumn of 1698 the Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino reached this shore looking for the river mouth and identified the harbor that old geographers called Santa Clara. By 1873 a landing called Puerto Isabel operated nearby, where ocean ships transferred cargo to the steamboats that ran up the Colorado to Yuma; the traffic faded once the railroad reached Yuma in 1877. The present village grew out of camps of totoaba fishermen, after the gulf's biggest fish, now nearly extinct, and was formally founded as a fishing colony in 1966.

The beach is wide and flat and runs for dozens of kilometers to the south. Tides here rise and fall more than six meters, so check a tide chart before camping on the sand or driving onto it. The El Machorro dune, about 50 meters high, looks over the sea and is a favorite of dune-buggy and ATV riders. From January to March, just after the full and new moons, grunion come ashore to spawn and draw dozens of bird species to the waterline. Easter week is another story: in 2026 about 35,000 people and 12,000 vehicles came, most of them to El Machorro beach. The village lies inside the Upper Gulf of California and Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve, created in 1996.