Los Cabos is a municipality, not a town, and it contains two places people confuse with each other almost every time. Cabo San Lucas is the one you have heard of: the arch, the marina, the beach clubs, the cruise ships, the nightlife. San Jose del Cabo is twenty miles up the coast and is the other thing entirely.
The confusion works in your favor. Most people book Cabo, mean Cabo, and never come up here except for dinner.
What is actually different
Cabo San Lucas is built around its marina and sells a good time. That is what it is for, and it does it well.
San Jose del Cabo kept its old town. There is a square with a church on it, a grid of low colonial streets around it, galleries where you would expect souvenir shops, and restaurants that grow a serious amount of what they serve. It is slower, it is cheaper, and it empties out at night rather than filling up.
They are about half an hour apart, so you are never choosing one and losing the other. You can stay in the quiet one and drive down for the loud one, which is a much easier evening than doing it the other way round.
Tip
The airport is on the San Jose side, a few minutes north of town. If you are staying in San Jose you are off the plane and at your hotel while everyone bound for Cabo San Lucas is still on the road.
Thursday is the night to be here
From November to June, the old town closes its streets every Thursday evening and holds an Art Walk. Galleries stay open from about five until nine, the plaza turns into an open air market, and people wander with ice cream and no particular plan.
It is the one night the town is busy, and it is busy with the right kind of busy. If your dates include a Thursday in that window, build the week around it.
If they do not, the galleries are still there the rest of the time and you will have them to yourself.
Eating
This is the part that surprised us. For a place this size the food is disproportionately good, and much of it comes off farms a few minutes inland.
Flora Farms is the one everyone names, and it earns it. It is an actual working farm with a restaurant in the middle of it, and the drinks list is as interesting as the food: nearly everything can be made with or without alcohol, built out of whatever is growing. The Farmarita is a margarita made with heirloom carrot. The Pelo de Perro is a Bloody Mary made with heirloom tomato water.
Eating gluten free here is straightforward for the usual Mexican reason: corn does the work, so most of what arrives at the table was never going to contain wheat. Ask anyway, because wheat tortillas are common in Baja.
The estuary
At the edge of town there is a freshwater estuary where the river meets the sea, and it is a bird sanctuary. It takes an hour, it costs nothing, and it is the opposite of everything Los Cabos is marketed as.
Which one should you stay in
San Jose del Cabo if you want to walk to dinner, sleep at night, and spend less. Cabo San Lucas if the marina and the nightlife are the reason you are coming.
We would stay in San Jose every time and visit the other one, and we suspect most people who try it that way round do the same.