In Cabo Pulmo, the ocean was nearly empty—decades of overfishing had stripped the reef until locals could barely catch enough to eat. Then the village made one desperate decision: ban all fishing in their waters.
Cabo Pulmo sits on the eastern cape of the Baja Peninsula, where the Gulf of California narrows toward some of the warmest, most nutrient-rich water in the eastern Pacific. The reef there, roughly 20,000 years old, is the only living hard coral formation on the west coast of North America. It was once part of what Jacques Cousteau called the aquarium of the world.By the early 1990s, that aquarium…