There’s a moment — when the sea stills, your breath catches, and a shimmer of turquoise moves below the surface — that feels like magic. Then, with a slow, thunderous exhale, a blue whale surfaces near your boat. It’s a sound you feel in your chest. It’s humbling, unforgettable, and utterly Baja.

Giants in the Sea of Life: Blue Whales in Mexico

The blue whale — Balaenoptera musculus — is the largest animal ever known to exist. North Pacific blue whales grow up to about 90 feet and weigh over 100,000 pounds (NOAA Fisheries). In Antarctica, adult females can reach up to 110 feet in length, and their hearts alone are the size of a small car! Yet for all their immensity, blue whales are gentle, elusive, and profoundly graceful.

Research from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) shows that blue whales’ deep calls can travel hundreds of miles underwater. During migration, this helps them communicate across vast distances. In Baja, these hauntingly low songs echo beneath the surface as they navigate their seasonal routes.

Baja’s deep canyons and rich upwellings create a marine buffet that draws whales, dolphins, and whale sharks throughout the seasons. Here, travelers don’t just witness blue whales, but an entire ecosystem teeming with life. Dolphins weaving between the waves, mobula rays leaping into the air, and whale calves playing and learning survival skills near the surface.

As Captain Pascal, resident ocean expert, recalls:

…we had encounters with blue whales the entire day… I guess, and this is an educated guess, we saw 8–12 different blues. We had a total of 77 individual sightings of those whales… That is a mind-blowing number, and we are talking about one of the more shy whales, which are not seen in a lot of places worldwide.

An animal of superlatives, a peninsula of superlatives, a trip of superlatives.”

Captain’s Log, January 2025

Curious about Baja’s other whales? You’ll love our blog: ‘Whale Watching In Baja: Species, Seasons, And The Best Spots’

Voices from the Deck — Blue Whale Encounters in Mexico

We can say that Baja is the best place to see blue whales, but no scientific fact can compare to seeing these giants in person. Guests immersed in the Baja Ultimate Whales expedition describe the experience with joy and pure wonder.

Isobel and Jennifer, visitors from England, shared:

To say we were impressed is an understatement! … Once we started, we didn’t stop. Pascal told us what to look out for and had the whole group watching for the distinctive blowhole spray. He was a fantastic captain of the RIB, able to position us right next to where the whales were swimming… It was magical!

…They were gorgeous creatures to see up close and truly breathtaking in their natural habitat; a once-in-a-lifetime experience… and one we won’t forget for a long time!”

Guest Report, January 2025

Captain Mantarey, a lifelong Sea of Cortez mariner, reflected:

An amazing day with blue whales in the Sea of Cortez. I have been working here all my life, and today is one of my best encounters — almost a hundred sightings in the day with at least 12 different individuals… This unique spectacle can only occur in the Sea of Cortez.”

Captain’s Log, January 2025

And from Clair and Greta, epic memories from their first day aboard the Gallant Lady:

Our first full day was an epic blockbuster! … We were super lucky with our day and conditions, and had one big blue whale reappear for us many times. Plus, we could see the spouts of at least three other blue whales in our local area. They are truly awe-inspiring creatures.”

Guest Report, February 2024

Wondering how the Sea of Cortez fits into your travel route? Check out our ‘Baja Mexico Map’.

Once-in-a-Lifetime Encounters

So what makes Baja California Sur the best place to see blue whales? Calm, blue waters, nutrient-rich upwellings, and krill blooms make the Sea of Cortez one of the few places you can reliably spot blue whales.

Whether you’re a wildlife enthusiast, photographer, or simply chasing the world’s most extraordinary encounters, seeing blue whales in Mexico is an experience beyond words. Each exhale of a whale is a reminder of how wild and connected our planet is.

The Sea of Cortez has been called “the world’s aquarium,” a phrase coined by Jacques Cousteau, who extensively documented its exceptional biodiversity. Its nutrient-rich waters and protected marine parks supports incredible marine life. Look out for pods of dolphins and colonies of sea lions to keep you entertained between blue whale sightings!

With Baja Expeditions’ expert crew, observation-plane support, and deep respect for marine life, you can witness the giants of the deep in a way few people ever will. Sustainably. Up close. And with wonder that lasts a lifetime.

Ready to trade screens for sea spray?

Let your Baja Expeditions team plan your next big adventure. We handle every detail — all you need to do is show up, breathe in the salty air, and watch the ocean’s biggest residents.

Contact us today to start your journey to see Baja’s blue whales.

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There’s no shortage of amazing gray whale facts to discover, from record-breaking migrations to why they’re known as the friendliest whales on Earth. To celebrate these gentle giants, we’ve pulled together 10 fun facts about gray whales. So if you’re wondering how fast they swim, why they were once called the “devil fish,” or what makes them unique, read on for a Gray Whale 101 you won’t forget.

1. Gray Whale Facts: The Ocean’s 40-Ton Heavyweight

Gray whales (Eshrichtius robustus) reach 40-50 feet in length and can weigh as much as 40 tons. That’s the equivalent of about 8 African elephants or 60 cows! These giants outlive their barnyard counterparts, with an average lifespan of 55–70 years compared to just 22 years for cows.

2. The World’s Longest Mammal Migration

Gray whales hold the record for the longest known migration of any mammal on Earth! Each October, they swim 5,000–6,000 miles from the frigid Arctic Ocean to the warm waters around Baja California Sur. Traveling at a speed of just 2–6 miles per hour, they make their way to San Ignacio Lagoon, where they mate, give birth, and raise their calves. The lagoon is a designated UNESCO Heritage Site, and one of the last undeveloped gray whale birthing sites on the planet—a true sanctuary for these gentle giants and their young.

3. Why Are San Ignacio’s Gray Whales So Friendly?

Usually incredibly shy, the gray whales in San Ignacio Lagoon are unusually curious, and affectionately called the “friendly ones”. While we aren’t sure why, it seems mothers pass this unique whale culture to their young, and being part of it is truly magical. Looking a 45-foot gray whale in the eye is a truly life-changing experience.

4. The Only Place On Earth You Can Pet a Whale

You might have heard whispers about the legendary lagoon, where gray whales swim right up to boats for a curious look—and sometimes even a pat! While wildlife is usually best appreciated from a distance, San Ignacio Lagoon is unique for its close-up whale encounters. Rest assured that protecting this whale nursery comes first and foremost. This means we don’t chase interaction; the whales approach our pangas to be stroked and petted, and they seem to enjoy it just as much as humans do.

Related Reading: ‘Whale Watching in San Ignacio Lagoon: Where the Gray Whales Call the Shots’

5. San Ignacio: Baby Whale Nursery

Most females will begin to calve at around eight to nine years old, and will birth a single calf every two years. Pregnant females are the first whales to arrive in San Ignacio, and their pregnancy lasts 13 months. Gray whale calves are generally born in the sheltered lagoons of Baja California around January. It appears that mothers choose these protected, shallow bays to protect their young from predators, such as sharks and orcas.

6. Newborn Gray Whales

Baby gray whales, otherwise known as calves, are anything but tiny. A newborn tips the scales at around 2,000 pounds and can measure up to 15 feet long. That’s roughly the size of a 1979 Volkswagen Beetle or a pair of grand pianos! Despite their size, calves are still dependent on their mothers, nursing up to 50 gallons of rich, fatty milk every day for about seven months. When leaving Baja’s lagoons, these “babies” need to be strong enough to tackle the long migration north alongside their mothers.

7. Unique Gray Whale Facts: What Sets Them Apart

Gray whales are baleen whales, meaning they filter their food through comb-like plates that hang from the upper jaw. Amazingly, these baleen plates are made of keratin, the same material as human hair and fingernails. Unlike most other baleen whales, gray whales are primarily bottom feeders. They scoop up big mouthfuls of sediment from the seafloor and strain out small crustaceans. However, they are also known to skim plankton from the surface just like other baleen whales, especially in their northern feeding grounds.

8. No Two Gray Whales Look Alike

You can easily recognize gray whales by their mottled skin, marked with scars, and clusters of barnacles and lice. These rough textures and colorful markings aren’t just striking to see—they’re unique to each individual. Much like human fingerprints, scientists use these patterns to identify and track whales throughout their vast migrations.

9. The Devil Fish

Back in the 1800s, gray whales were hunted relentlessly, especially in whaling hotspots like Magdalena Bay. Their fierce resistance earned them the nickname “devil fish.” Unlike the gentle giants we know today, these whales fought back against whalers’ harpoons. Mother whales were especially fearless, even ramming boats in defense of their calves. Thankfully, gray whales have been protected from commercial whaling since 1949, and their populations have made a remarkable recovery.

10. Gray Whale Population: A Conservation Success Story

Wondering how many gray whales are left today? The current Eastern North Pacific population has made a remarkable recovery to around 20,000 individuals. It is now considered stable and was removed from the Endangered Species List in 1994. In contrast, Western Pacific gray whales still face threats from fishing and oil and gas exploration. They only number about 250 individuals and are considered critically endangered.

Gray whales never fail to amaze us, and we’re sure there are even more fun facts out there—share your favorites with us!

Want to turn your curiosity into a real-life experience? Discover the magic of San Ignacio Lagoon on a guided whale tour with Baja Expeditions.

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Mike Lever, President of Nautilus Dive Adventures, is currently at San Ignacio lagoon putting the finishing touches into our new wildlife glamping adventure. The new adventure tour will allow guests to experience comfort never seen before in San Ignacio lagoon, while experiencing some of the greatest whale interactions on earth, bringing adventure travel in Mexico to a whole new level…

True Adventure in San Ignacio

What am I doing here?? It’s cold. It’s damp. It was windy for the last couple of days, although it’s flat calm today. It’s sandy and services are limited. And it’s a super difficult place to get to by car, with washed out roads that are full of potholes and washboard bumps…

Well. This remote desert halfway down Baja California in Mexico is one of the last places in the world where gray whales migrate from vast distances to mate, breed and prepare new calves for the long journey north to feed and become strong. San Ignacio Lagoon is the first and primary stopping off spot on their southward migration and boasts a much greater density of friendly whales than the other lagoons further south. What makes this desolate spot worth visiting is the incredible behaviour of the whales once they are in the lagoon – these giants of the sea literally swim up to our pangas to be petted and stroked and have us scratch them between their pectoral fins.

This is the most incredible whale interaction on the planet.

Is It Worth the Tough Living Conditions?

Yes, for sure in my opinion. I thought about this a lot as I bundled up in the cold and damp for an evening walk along the beach in front of our camp last night. Interacting with these gray whales is a life experience, and the desert has a primal beauty that I can feel touching my soul. The sunrise over the mountains to the east of camp was spectacular this morning. The night sky under millions of bright stars is almost indescribable. The moon is shining so brightly away from city lights that I don’t need a flashlight to walk around camp.

I don’t want to leave. I am very glad that I am here.

But it’s also time for change and to bring luxury and excellence in guest experience to the lagoon. After 28 years of running a basic eco camp, we are working with the local panga captains and fishing families to build a brand-new camp that will combine eco sensitivity with luxuries never seen before in at the lagoon.

Luxury Wilderness Camping in San Ignacio

What does this entail?

Super high end heated and insulated glamping tents that are completely impervious and silent even on windy days. Super convenient one hour and 40-minute charter flights from Cabo San Lucas landing directly at our camp. Real beds and mattresses with beautiful linen, as well as private bathrooms and showers in all the tents. A private porch outside each tent with lounge chairs situated for both privacy and to get the best view of the sunset over the lagoon. Hot tubs, fire pits, 24-hour internet access and 24-hour silent AC power. Phew.

We also feature the only loaner mountain bikes for biking and hiking trails. Not to mention a spacious diving tent alongside another large tent for a bar and lounge – including an excellent selection of craft beer, wine and single malts – and a third large tent at the other end of the camp that is family friendly. I’m here helping put the finishing touches on camp.

We’ll be ready for our season opener on January 25th. Our whales tell us that they will be ready as well.

Covid Friendly Travel

Most importantly for these difficult times during the virus crisis, we have developed a 60-page document of virus protocols and procedures to keep everyone as safe as possible. The icing on the cake? We’ve introduced a special 2021 value package for this difficult year.

Get in touch to plan the ultimate adventure tour in Mexico on our wildlife glamping expedition to San Ignacio lagoon.

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A research expedition set sail early this week aboard our Baja Expeditions’ Catamaran El Mechudo. A team of researchers from the Gulf of California Marine Program and Sociedad de Historia Natural Niparajá set off to re-visit previously established Fisheries Refuges. These scientists have been busy conducting interviews with community members and gathering data along the way. They have also been photographing mangrove estuary ecosystems all along the Mechudo Corridor, south of Loreto and north of La Paz.

Sustainable Tourism Supporting Local Conservation

Family owned and operated since 1974, Baja Expeditions offers sustainable tourism that supports local environmental education, field research, and conservation efforts. We collaborate with a variety of partners across sectors to provide access to the rich biodiversity in the deserts and seas of the Baja peninsula, its wilderness, and official Natural Protected Areas. We are proud to play a small role within a larger community advocating for sustainable management,preservation of natural resources, and healthy communities in the Gulf of California and Baja California Sur. We are so pleased to be able to support exactly this type of expedition.

Research Collective led by Octavio Aburto-Oropeza

Marine Biologist Octavio Aburto is hard at work with his GoC Marine Program team that includes Rachel Labbe-Bellas, Astrid Hsu, and Ben Meissner. Their goal this past week has been to re-visit areas with designated Fisheries Refuges in Baja, and document how the areas have responded to these Refuges, as well as how the communities are benefiting from these changes. The Gulf of California Marine Program “is dedicated to generating and disseminating scientific information that has a direct, positive impact on conservation and management issues and policies in the region.”

The Gulf Program consists of a team of scientists, students, and professionals from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, Centro para la Biodiversidad Marina y la Conservación, and UCMEXUS-University of California Riverside. Freelance journalist Oscar Cuso Pérez of Spain joins the expedition to cover the efforts for international publication.

Concerned About the Health of Ocean Reefs

Octavio Aburto-Oropeza has co-authored a piece about Recovering Fisheries Resources in the Gulf of California together with Niparajá’s Sustainable Fisheries Program Coordinator Amy Hudson Weaver. That piece reminds us that “Ocean reefs are a source of food and income for many coastal communities that extract a great variety of fish, mainly for human consumption, like groupers, snappers or parrotfish. Because of this exploitation, many populations of these species have changed in abundance and the reefs have deteriorated. One of the main tools used to mitigate these changes has focused on protecting reefs by prohibiting fishing activities in affected areas. These areas are known by different names: Marine Protected Areas, Fish Refuges, Marine Reserves, etc. , but all of them seek to recover marine ecosystems and populations of exploited species.”

Think Globally, Act Locally

Octavio and his team are accompanied on this week’s expedition by local researchers Juan José Cota Nieto, and Ollín González. Ollín works with Amy Hudson Weaver in Niparajá’s Sustainable Fisheries Program. Niparajá’s 2016 Annual Report offered a perspective on their recent accomplishments with the Fishing Refuges Area Network:

For the fifth consecutive year, we worked with communities along the San Cosme-Punta Coyote Corridor, the Aquaculture and Fishing National Commission, the National Fishing Institute, the BCS Central Area Cooperatives Federation, researchers, and other organizations to promote the smooth running of Progress includes establishing the Fishing Management Committee, the investment of public and private resources to install remote surveillance cameras for monitoring and assessing the Refuge Areas Network.

We collaborated with a group of 51 fishers and community members that participate in conservation and sustainable fishing actions, such as: underwater monitoring, fishing catch registry, strengthening of leadership capacity, community surveillance, and participation in forums as their communities’ spokesperson. Their work allows assessing the Refuge Areas Network and promoting this instrument in different forums.

Mangroves. . . for the Fish and Birds

The Baja Expeditions’s team enjoyed an early morning outing across the channel of La Paz and into El Mogote mangrove estuaries for an early morning photo shoot. This outing aimed bring attention to the many birds and fish that call this area home–with photos worth well more than a thousand words. reports that:

Aburto-Oropeza is still using photos to communicate his scientific work, but his audience has expanded significantly. He’s a professor of marine biology at Scripps, and his photos depicting marine life have won international awards for photography and conservation and been published everywhere fromNational Geographic to the Daily Mail. His work is the subject of an exhibit at Birch Aquarium at Scripps. And now, he’s garnered one of his most prestigious prizes yet: the Explorers Club named Aburto-Oropeza as its 2017 Rolex Artist-in-Exploration. 

The award is a $25,000 grant, sponsored by Rolex, to support an artist working in the spirit of the Explorers Club, a renowned professional society that has supported scientific exploration for over 100 years. Aburto-Oropeza’s grant will support four expeditions to document four different mangrove forests in the Tropical Eastern Pacific Ocean.

Mangroves are trees that grow in the transition between land and ocean in tropical and subtropical areas, and provide many critical ecosystem functions.

It Takes a Village

Baja Expeditions’s founder Tim Means helped to build the stable base for exactly the work that continues today in the form of intentional wilderness expeditions. Through almost a half-century of work in eco-tourism and land advocacy and conservation, Means’s efforts. together with those of a like-minded collective, have inspired and cultivated institutional advocacy, community engagement and organizing, and sustained alternative economic opportunity and concrete policy decrees. They have also provided inspiration for the conservation of wild places and inhabited wilderness in the Baja peninsula. Means is also one of three co-founders of Sociedad de Historia Natural Niparajá, named for the local Pericú indigenous community.

In keeping with Means’s legacy and vision, Baja Expeditions continues to offer an array of expeditions, day trips, and community activities that give back; a portion of proceeds from all of our programming helps subsidize our support of local environmental education, research, and community projects. We love sharing our work with our guests, and coming up with new ways to advocate for the health of our seas and coasts. It takes a village to conserve a peninsula.

We can’t wait to welcome the Expedition Team back to La Paz this weekend!

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