Cabo Pulmo National Park 3.68

Cabo Pulmo National Park is a national marine park on the east coast of Mexico's Baja California Peninsula, spanning the distance between Pulmo Point and Los Frailes Cape, approximately 100km north of Cabo San Lucas in the Gulf of California. Bahía Pulmo is home to the oldest of only three coral reefs on the west coast of North America. Estimated to be 20,000 years old, it is the northernmost coral reef in the eastern Pacific Ocean.The reef has a number of fingers of hard coral atop rock outcroppings that run parallel to the coast, occurring in progressively deeper water offshore. The area was designated a national park in 1995, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005, and a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance in 2008.HistoryOn June 5, 1995, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo declared the 71.11sqkm area surrounding Cabo Pulmo a federally protected National Marine Park. On May 2, 1997, Jose Luis Pepe Murrieta was the first volunteer Park Director appointed by the INE (National Ecological Institute). The non-profit organization Patronato Cabo del Este, founded in 1997, was (and still is) Cabo Pulmo's primary supporting organization while the federal government built a budget for the park. A community organization known as Amigos para la Conservación de Cabo Pulmo ("Friends for the Conservation of Cabo Pulmo", or ACCP) was founded in 2002 to promote conservation of the natural resources of the park. Carlos Narro was appointed the first official Park Director by the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas (CONANP), a branch of the federal Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources, in 2004.