San Felipe sits at the northern tip of the Sea of Cortez in Baja California at the point where the desert comes all the way down to the water and stops, and the landscape around it is one of those combinations that shouldn't work as well as it does - the Sonoran desert on three sides, the blue-green water of the Cortez on the other, cacti growing within sight of the beach, pelicans working the same shoreline. The town has about 15,000 permanent residents and the whole thing exists essentially because of fishing, tourism from the US and northern Mexico, and the specific kind of person who drives down Baja looking for something the main tourist track doesn't offer.
The malecon is the center of social life in town - a seafront promenade with restaurants, taco stands, souvenir shops and the general easy movement of a Mexican coastal town that isn't trying to impress anyone. It's walkable from the hotel and the food quality along it is consistently good in the way that towns where fishing is the actual industry tend to produce - the shrimp and fish and clams come off the boats and onto the grill with a directness that resort restaurant supply chains cannot replicate regardless of menu price. The fish market at the south end of the malecon is worth finding on your first morning.
The tidal range in the upper Sea of Cortez is one of the most dramatic in the world - at low tide the water retreats so far that the beach doubles or triples in width and the tidal flats stretch out toward the horizon in a way that's genuinely disorienting the first time you see it. At high tide the water comes back up to the seawall. The rhythm of this shapes the whole day if you're paying attention, which is one of those things about San Felipe that distinguishes a stay here from a stay anywhere else on the Baja coast.
The desert around San Felipe is the Sonoran desert at its most characteristic - saguaro and cardon cacti, dry arroyos, volcanic rock, the specific silence of a landscape that doesn't have a lot of biological noise in it. The off-road trails in the area are extensive and the dunes south of town near Puertecitos have a reputation among ATV and dirt bike riders that draws serious enthusiasts from California and Arizona who come specifically for that terrain. It's not decorative desert - it's the real thing and it asks something of the people who go into it.