Los Cabos will tighten permits for itinerant sellers on El Médano, prioritising some and cutting others to protect the resort’s image.
Los Cabos is preparing to redraw the rules for its shoreline economy. After a fresh wave of complaints about unlicensed sales on El Médano and other busy beaches, Mayor Christian Agúndez announced that the municipality will tighten control of itinerant commerce and accept that some sellers will be left out of the new scheme. The stated goal is to protect the destination’s image at a time when visitor numbers keep rising and space on the sand is already crowded.
Agúndez said his administration is working on a plan to “regularise” beach vending in areas with heavy tourist traffic. He framed the move as a balance between the right to work and the “bien común”, but was blunt that the city will not be able to support everyone who now sells on the sand. He also warned that the changes could trigger protests from those excluded, even as he insisted that Los Cabos must “take care of tourism as much as possible.”
New rules for Los Cabos beach vendors
The mayor did not give dates or detailed criteria for the new controls. He said only that the city will prioritise certain groups of vendors, give legal certainty to “the majority”, and curb the overpopulation of sellers on beaches such as El Médano. Behind that cautious language is a long-running dispute over who gets to work the sand, and under what conditions. Business leaders argue that unchecked growth in informal sales is already hurting the destination’s reputation and creating room for abuse of visitors.
The Los Cabos business council has repeatedly complained that hundreds of uncredentialed vendors now operate along El Médano, often with more freedom than those who paid for permits. In early November, the council estimated that about 300 sellers are working without municipal credentials on that beach alone, on top of the several hundred who do have authorisation. A labour union that represents credentialed vendors has reported around 689 to 698 authorised sellers in the municipality, and warned that the growth of irregular competitors directly cuts into their earnings and weakens the destination’s image.
Municipal officials, for their part, insist there is more order than critics suggest. The delegate of Cabo San Lucas has publicly rejected descriptions of “descontrol” and says the local administration has already removed many unlicensed vendors from tourist zones. She has called for constant inspections by the fiscal authority to keep the system from slipping back into chaos. The mayor’s new announcement effectively acknowledges that current efforts have not fully resolved the problem and that a more restrictive permit policy is coming.
What remains unclear is how the municipality will decide who stays and who goes. Earlier in this administration, authorities agreed to stop granting new permits for El Médano and set a ceiling of roughly 700 authorised beach vendors. Inspection officials have also reported that around 695 sellers across beaches and marinas already hold valid municipal credentials, which suggests there is little room left for new entrants under the existing limits. Any additional tightening would likely rely on cancelling or refusing to renew permits rather than simply pausing new ones.
Long fight over order on El Médano
The coming crackdown is only the latest chapter in a years-long effort to bring order to El Médano. As far back as 2021, a state legislator from Baja California Sur urged a special census and stronger vigilance on the beach, estimating that around 2,000 vendors were operating there and warning that in some hours, more people were selling than swimming. He calculated that about 600 of those vendors held permits and depended on that income to support their families, and pressed the municipality to update its rules to match the growth in hotels and tourism.
Local authorities have tried several approaches since then. In 2019, the municipal inspection office began running vendor data through Plataforma México, the federal public security system, as part of a mass credentialing push on El Médano. Officials said more than 600 sellers were checked, and at least one person was detained because they had an outstanding arrest warrant in another state. The idea was to ensure that those allowed to work on the beach had clean records and proper documentation.
By 2022, the same office reported that 93 percent of 698 beach workers on El Médano had renewed their municipal permits, highlighting the scale of the activity and the effort to keep it within the legal framework. In early 2024, inspection officials acknowledged that, despite those controls, the number of vendors on El Médano had effectively doubled, and that the beach and marina corridor was “overpopulated” with itinerant commerce. They said inspectors were conducting regular patrols, checking for credentials and uniforms, and issuing administrative fines and confiscations to those who did not comply.
This year, a coordination table that brings together municipal, state and federal agencies, along with business representatives, reported that Los Cabos had around 1,500 ambulant vendors. In contrast, El Médano alone had 698 permits on paper and many more sellers in practice. Security officials in that group said there were no formal 911 reports of vendors offering drugs to tourists, but acknowledged constant complaints from hotels and businesses. They also promised to address the presence of minors working on beaches and to strengthen night-time inspections in tourist zones.
The municipality has also pledged to expand labour options beyond the sand. In its own communications, City Hall says the Mesa Comercio Informal is working with business chambers to promote more formal jobs, and is studying measures such as surveillance cameras on key beaches and extra patrols to detect unlicensed sellers and children working at night. Those efforts show how central beach vending has become to the local economy and to debates over safety and image in Los Cabos.
For now, though, many details of the new control scheme remain undefined. The mayor has not said how many permits could be revoked, which categories of vendors will be “prioritised”, or what kind of transition will be offered to those left outside the municipal padrón. What is clear is that the next round of decisions will test the city’s ability to balance three competing pressures: the need to keep tourists coming back, the demand from business groups for order on the sand, and the livelihoods of hundreds of families whose workday begins and ends on Los Cabos’ beaches.
