Learn The Secret Life of Sea Turtles
There are seven sea turtle species in the world, and Baja California Sur is home to a remarkable five of them—the hawksbill, loggerhead, leatherback, black turtle and olive ridley—all of which are endangered. These amazing sea creatures can hold their breath for up to seven hours at a time, slow their heartbeat to once every nine minutes, and most can dive to depths of up to 960 ft. (or nearly 100 stories underwater). But there’s another trait that’s even more astonishing, and the reason we give each of our guests a wooden sea turtle when they leave.
In a phenomenon called natal homing, female sea turtles migrate thousands of miles from their ocean habitats to nest on the coast, sometimes to the very same beach where they were born decades earlier. (Leatherbacks travel especially far, with one recorded to have migrated more than 12,000 miles.) Scientists think sea turtles use the earth’s magnetic fields to navigate back to the general area where they were born, and they can identify their exact birth beach through unique characteristics like a smell.
So the next time you spot a sea turtle on our beach, take time to marvel at their miraculous journey to return to our shore. Symbolic of these well-traveled creatures, we gift a wooden sea turtle in the hope that one day, like the sea turtle, you will return to Esperanza once more. After all, Esperanza does translate to ‘hope.’