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Town of San Felipe
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Located 120 miles south of the Mexican border on the northwestern Baja, is the town of San Felipe. Along Highway 5, you’ll encounter many peaks, but you’ll find San Felipe below Picacho del Diablo. It shoulders up over ten thousand feet into the air and in winter, its summit is often a claw of snow and ice. It is nearly always sunny in San Felipe, warm for most of the year and something of a smithy's forge in the summer months. San Felipe is blessed with reasonably clean water, drawn from an underground river located several miles south of town.
 The first European to set foot on the sands of what he called San Felipe de Jesus, was the Jesuit Padre Juan de Ugarte, in 1721. De Ugarte was exploring the inner coast of the Baja. Twenty five years later Father Fernando Consag, another Jesuit, mapped the area and marked the location of the bay. In the late eighteenth century the Dominicans, third and last of the religious orders to embrace the indigenous peoples of the Baja Peninsula with their dogmas, attempted to make San Felipe a supply post for its northern missions. Attacks on their storage sheds and supply trains by the aggressive Yuma Indians persuaded the Dominicans to relocate their depositories to the Pacific coast.
In the mid-eighteen hundreds, gold fever seemed to grip the entire west coast of North America. Prospectors flooded over the American borders into Mexico and shacks began to spring up in the San Felipe area. But when the mines didn’t yield as expected, the shacks were left to the heat and wind. Plans to develop San Felipe as a mining port were abandoned.
In 1855, Guillermo Andrade leased 30,000 hectares around the bay. In 1876, he made a contract with the Federal Government to colonize the area, but died before he could complete his project.
In the early nineteen hundreds the governor of the territory, Coronel Esteban Cantú Jiménez moved the capital of Baja from Ensenada to Mexicali. He planned to connect the new capital by roads and railway to a young port at San Felipe. In 1916, Coronel Cantú began the first of three expeditions to San Felipe. Problems and supply shortages aborted the first two journeys, but the third one was successful. It was Governor Cantú's engineers who built the first car-access road to San Felipe. Cantú's administration permitted precious metal prospecting in the area and that is what attracted the first white 'settlers'. But available funds could not support his ambitions and again San Felipe was abandoned. The San Felipe property purchased by Cantu gradually moved into the hands of his descendants, where it appreciated in value merely from proximity to someone else's partially realized or failed real estate scheme.
In the 1940's, ex-President of Mexico Aberlardo Rodríguez, wanting to increase tourist activity in the area, graded and paved Cantú's deteriorating road. At the same time, his brother José María Rodríguez Luján, who owned over 4,000 hectares of San Felipe, established the Port of San Felipe and other enterprises.
Commercial benefits began to attach themselves to San Felipe as the Colorado River was harnessed to provide irrigation to the farmlands of the Imperial Valley to the north. Mexicali slowly became an oasis of rich, arable land and the population increased. During the Second World War, the American Army's Corps of Engineers constructed a usable road to San Felipe where it built a Submarine-Watch Station. Sharks began to be harvested for their livers, which were discovered to contain ten times the amount of vitamin A as the livers of codfish. Alongside this enterprise, local Chinese shipped the bladders of the huge totuava fish back to China where they were dried and ground into powders used to enrich and thicken soups. When two American entrepreneurs saw the great corpses of the bladderless totuavas simply pushed into the surf, they began their own business by hauling ice from across the border and transporting the fish to California, where they were sold to restaurants as "sea bass".
Then a former Mexican president, Ableardo Rodriquez, and a lawyer named Guillermo Rosas, seeing the generosity of the sea's abundance, purchased a large part of the village. They planned to make San Felipe the center of a tourist sports fishing industry.
They sent an American fisherman into the area to assess the angling potential of the surrounding waters. Two years later the road was improved and the town began to attract tourists, both for its beauty and its sport fishing. Since then, San Felipe has grown on a solid foundation of hooks, nets, pangas, shrimp boats, restaurants and the American dollar. And more recently, the investment and retirement potential of the area.
San Felipe is generously supplied with striking landmarks that can be seen from nearly anywhere in town and a few that can be seen from miles out of town. There are the arches, called by the Department of Tourism The Gateway to the Sea of Cortez. These are two tall plaster and metal "goal posts" standing so close together they form the letter M. The inside profile is of two arches painted a blinding white. They sit in the middle of a traffic circle at the entrance to the town. About three miles north of town the highway curves into a view of these "gates" and they can be seen from almost anywhere in town.
Then there is El Machorro, a high peak on Punta San Felipe, a promontory at the northeastern end of town. From the top of this hill there is a spectacular view of the entire Valle de San Felipe, the sprawling San Pedro Martir mountains and the vast Sea of Cortez which sparkles like an opened jewelry box against the endless blond beaches.
There is the Cerro de la Virgen, a hill where a very recognizable capilla or chapel faces east toward mainland Mexico. The chapel (dedicated to La Virgen de Guadalupe) is white and built of cement blocks. It's highest wall, facing south, was cleverly designed so that two rows of missing blocks formed a cross. It is during times of severe weather the wives of local fishermen make the long ascent up the stairs to the altar where they offer up candles and flowers to the resident statue of the Virgen de Guadalupe and pray for the safe return of their husbands from the sea.
Another prominent landmark, very close to the chapel, is the lighthouse. This can also be seen from many parts of town and anywhere along the south shore as far as El Faro. In the evening it is a beacon for all visitors as well as any boats fishing at night.
Most areas of Sann Felipe now have electricity. Telephones, both cellular and land-line, reach many miles north and south of the town. In San Felipe, you can find almost every amenity offered by larger communities. There are laundri-mats, beauty salons, video rental stores, storage facilities, upholsterers, glass repair shops, sign painters, appliance repairs, lumber yards, doctors, dentists, masseuse, even a chiropractor.
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