Sidebar: The Legacy of the Lagoon

In 1994, the US Endangered Species List moved the Eastern Pacific gray whale (also known as the California gray) from "endangered" to merely "threatened." This change held a special significance for conservationists and politicians alike. After five decades of close stewardship between conservationists and government officials in Mexico, Canada and the US, gray whale numbers had rebounded from near-extinction to an estimated population of 23,000.

By the 1870s, whalers plying at Baja's San Ignacio and Scammons (Ojo de Liebre) lagoons and San Ignacio had hunted this species to near-annihilation. In the 1920s, another wave of unbridled slaughter nearly wiped out the Eastern Pacific species of gray whales.

In 1938, with only a thousand Eastern Pacific grays left, Mexico and the US signed an international agreement as part of the League of Nations that granted limited protection to the whales. While this was an important symbolic step, it was the International Whaling Commission's (IWC) 1946 global moratorium on all commercial whaling of gray whales that marked the true beginning of the species' return.

In the ensuing decades, industrial and commercial development slowly began to alter Baja's gray whale lagoons and the shores along their Pacific Coast migration route. Only San Ignacio Lagoon remained relatively unchanged.

In 1976, San Ignacio Lagoon was declared a gray whale sanctuary by the Mexican government and, in 1988, the lagoon was installed as the vital southeast cornerstone of the 9833-square-mile El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve - the largest of it's kind in Latin America.

Because of its importance to gray whales, San Ignacio Lagoon was designated a UN World Heritage Site in 1993. Mexican and international bodies had come to recognize the importance of San Ignacio's fragile ecosystem - a unique stretch of arid desert, salt flats and lagoon that is collectively home to more than 80 terrestrial plant and animal species. In addition to gray whales, the lagoon ecosystem also supports endangered leatherback and green sea turtles, Sonoran pronghorn antelope, big horn sheep, white pelicans, golden eagles, and peregrine falcons. The lagoon also hosts the northern-most mangrove forests in the Western Hemisphere.