A Small Destination Wedding in Cabo
Yes. Not only can you have a small and intimate destination wedding in Cabo, you can have one of the most beautiful weddings this coast produces. The question comes up constantly in the early months of planning, usually from a couple who suspects that a destination wedding has to mean a hundred and fifty guests, a resort ballroom, and a budget to match. It does not. I have been producing weddings in Los Cabos since the late 1990s, and I can tell you something the current industry tends to forget: a small wedding is not a lesser version of a Cabo wedding. It is where Los Cabos began.
The Way It Began
When I started, an intimate wedding was simply what a Cabo wedding was: A Small Destination Wedding. Fifty guests was the norm. The larger celebrations rarely passed eighty. Those weddings have stayed with me in a way the enormous ones sometimes do not, because the scale let everything breathe. Guests sat at tables that could see one another. The couple spoke to each person who came, rather than waving across a lawn. Dinner felt like dinner, not a production running to a clock. The whole weekend had the texture of a very good party thrown by people who loved you, because that is essentially what it was. I remember those weddings the way you remember a favorite song, every detail still in place: the light going long over the water, the sound of one table laughing, the particular ease of a night with nothing to prove.
There was a practical reason for the size, and it is worth understanding, because it explains everything that followed. Los Cabos was harder to reach then. Fewer flights, fewer routes, a longer journey from most of the world. When travel is difficult, a guest list stays honest on its own. Only the people who truly belonged at the wedding made the trip. The intimacy was not yet a decision. It was the shape the distance gave us. So organically is was a small destination wedding, an intimate wedding experience.
What Changed
Then travel to Los Cabos grew easier, and it kept growing easier. Direct flights multiplied, new routes opened from cities that once required two connections, and the cape became a place you could reach in an afternoon from much of North America. This has been wonderful for the region, and in most ways wonderful for couples. But it quietly changed the arithmetic of the guest list. When it is easy to come, more people come. An invitation that once asked something of a guest now asks very little, the easy yes replaces the considered one, and the list that would have settled at fifty drifts toward a hundred and then past it. None of this happens by decision. It happens by default, one understandable name at a time, until a couple who wanted something intimate is quietly planning something else.
Intimacy Is Now a Choice
This is the real answer to the question. Weddings here did not grow because couples stopped wanting intimacy. They grew because ease removed the natural limit that used to protect it. Which means that today, a small wedding destination wedding in Cabo is something you choose, on purpose, against a current that pulls the other way.
The single most important thing you can do to protect a beautiful, intimate destination wedding is also the simplest and the hardest: curate the guest list, deliberately and early. Keep it smaller than the room allows. Invite the people whose absence you would feel at the altar, and resist the slow expansion that follows every easy yes. What you receive in return is not a smaller wedding so much as a deeper one. The budget that would have stretched across two hundred plates can instead buy a once-in-a-lifetime dinner for forty. You can host fully, see everyone, and actually attend your own wedding rather than manage it.
It helps to know what you are choosing among. An elopement is the two of you and a witness or two, the vows stripped to their essence. An intimate wedding gathers the inner circle, the people who would be in the first three rows of any wedding, somewhere between a handful and forty. A small wedding holds that same warmth while opening the doors a little wider, to fifty, perhaps the old Cabo ceiling of eighty. None of these is a compromise. Each is simply a different answer to the only question that matters, which is who you want in the room.
Where to Have It
The intimate wedding also opens a part of Los Cabos the large ones cannot use. A hundred-and-fifty-guest celebration needs a resort lawn or a ballroom that can hold it. A wedding for forty can go almost anywhere, and the most beautiful anywheres on this coast are small by nature. The region’s hospitality has grown to meet exactly this: boutique resorts, hidden gems, and the garden and farm venues we love most for celebrations of this scale. El Huerto, with its farm-to-table heart and its growing beds. Acre, set inland among the palms with the sensibility of a design hotel. Floral Farms and Baja Luna, gardens so alive they need almost no dressing. And Amara Baja, an ocean-view venue whose open-air chapel draws on the architecture of Baja’s old missions and faces the Pacific straight into golden hour.
What these places share is a scale that a small group completes rather than rattles around in. A long table set under the trees. A chapel that seats your closest people and no one else. A terrace where the whole party can hear the same toast. These are settings where an intimate wedding feels held, not lost, and where Karla Casillas & Co. has spent years building the relationships that let a celebration unfold as though the property were yours alone.
A Complete Design, and a Full Wedding Weekend
If there is a fear hidden inside the question, it is usually this one: that a small wedding must also be a spare one, a dinner and a toast and little else. It does not. Everything a large wedding can have, an intimate one can have too, designed in full rather than scaled down: the considered palette, the in-house florals and rentals, the tablescape built for forty as carefully as anyone would build it for two hundred, the lighting that turns a garden into a room after dark. If anything, intimacy lets the design go further. A budget that is not spread thin across a crowd can be spent on the things that are actually touched and remembered, the linens and the glassware, the single perfect course, the flowers seen at close range rather than surveyed from across a tent.
The weekend can be whole, too. Nothing confines a small wedding to a single evening. There is room for a welcome dinner the night before, a long lunch or a sail on the Sea of Cortés the next day, a farewell breakfast that sends everyone home slowly. With your closest people gathered in one place, those gatherings stop being logistics to manage and become the reason you came. We design the entire arc and every event around it, the complete experience, with the same care whether the table seats forty or far more.
A Last Word
So, yes. You can have a small destination wedding in Cabo, and if you ask me, you can have the best kind here. The intimate wedding is not a fallback for couples who cannot manage a large one. It is the original form of the Los Cabos wedding, the one I fell in love with at the start of my career, now available to anyone with the discipline to choose it. The distance no longer decides the size for you. You do. Choose a small number of the right people, bring them to a place that suits them, and let the wedding be exactly as large as your heart, and no larger. That is not a smaller celebration. In every way that lasts, it is a greater one. It is also, I think, the truest thing this coast still offers: a wedding small enough to feel, in a place beautiful enough to remember, surrounded only by the people who were always meant to be there.
The House Journal is the editorial of Karla Casillas & Co.
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