Cabo San Lucas and San Jose Del Cabo are the two villages at the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula. They practically fuse together in an ever-growing line of beachfront resorts, tourist shops and theme restaurants and bars in the tradition of Cancun and Acapulco.

You'll find plenty of small dive shops among the sprawling development, each offering a relaxed program of two-tank morning dives in and around Cabo San Lucas Bay where the rocky Land's End peninsula shelters divers from surf and surge and provides sandy Lover's Beach for surface intervals. Dive sites like Anegada Rock start in as little as 20 feet of water, but slope down to rocky outcroppings as deep as 80 feet and, eventually, a sheer granite wall that bottoms out at 1,000 feet. At the mouth of the bay, The Point is a cylindrical rock washed in tidal surge and Pacific swells, but it's a great place to find mantas, eels and even sea lions.

Advanced divers can book day-trips outside the bay to seamounts like Banco Gorda, which attract sharks and big schools of jacks, and submerged canyons like Blowhole that concentrate plankton and draw in manta rays. You can also arrange trips to Pulmo Reef.