Todos Santos Runs Two Turtle Seasons at Once, and Right Now You're in the Quiet One

Drive out to Las Playitas on a late August evening expecting a turtle release and you will most likely find an empty stretch of sand, a locked gate, and maybe a few other people standing around checking their phones. Nobody is negligent. Nobody forgot to post the schedule. The show most people picture when they think of Todos Santos turtle season simply has not started yet, even though the town has been deep into its most important turtle work for weeks.

That gap between what visitors expect and what is actually happening on the beach is the whole story here. Todos Santos does not run one turtle season. It runs two, tracked by two different organizations, following two different sets of species, on two different calendars that only partially overlap. Understanding which one you are in changes what you should be doing on the beach right now, and it explains why the famous releases everyone talks about are still weeks away.

The group most people have heard of is only half the picture

Grupo Tortuguero de Todos Santos A.C. is the organization behind the releases that show up in most travel guides. Formally organized in 2003, the group protects roughly 35 kilometers of coastline stretching from Punta Lobos down to Boca del Carrizal, one of the longer stretches of monitored nesting beach on this part of the Pacific coast. Its volunteers run collection routes at night, starting around 11 PM and finishing near 6 AM, walking the dark beach looking for nesting females and relocating their eggs to a central incubation corral at La Máquina beach, about eleven minutes from downtown.

That collection work runs roughly from July through November. It is quiet, unglamorous, and happens while most of the town sleeps. In a typical season the group collects more than 600 nests averaging around 100 eggs each, and manages to release more than 45,000 hatchlings back into the Pacific, a hatch and release rate of roughly 65 percent of what gets collected. But those numbers only start showing up as public releases after the eggs have had time to incubate, about 45 days from the night they are laid. That lag is why the group's release window generally runs September through January, not August. Eggs laid in early July are ready by mid-August. Eggs laid this week in late August will not hatch until mid-October.

A few beaches north, Tortugueros Las Playitas A.C. runs a different operation entirely. Based along Camino a Las Playitas near the beaches of Agua Blanca and Las Playitas, this group focuses heavily on the leatherback, or laúd, one of the largest and most endangered sea turtles that nest along this coast. Rather than an open-air corral, Las Playitas maintains an incubation greenhouse held at a steady 26 degrees Celsius, since leatherback eggs laid after October 1 need warmer, more consistent conditions than the cooling fall sand provides. That single design choice, a heated greenhouse instead of a beach corral, pushes their public release calendar later still: mid-November through February as the main window, with sporadic releases into March and April as the last nests finish.

Here is the comparison that rarely makes it into a single write-up, because most sources only cover one group or the other:

Two organizations, two species with different biology, two release calendars that barely overlap for more than a couple of months a year. That is the detail the generic version of this post leaves out, because it treats the entire fall and winter as one continuous season instead of two staggered ones.

What is actually happening on the beach this week

If the public releases have not started, that does not mean nothing is happening. It means the opposite. Late August sits inside the peak nesting window for the olive ridley and black turtles that Grupo Tortuguero tracks, and every night that patrol is out there in the dark, walking the sand between Punta Lobos and Boca del Carrizal, looking for fresh tracks and relocating nests before predators, poachers, or the tide find them first.

In one recent season, the group's president, Enedino Castillo García, told Tribuna de México that the team had already safeguarded roughly 40,000 eggs across 400 incubated nests, with 500 to 600 hatchlings expected to be released between then and November. The same reporting flagged a problem that has been getting worse as more visitors camp near the dunes: loose dogs, often belonging to tourists camping close to the nesting beaches, killing adult females while they lay and eating unguarded eggs, alongside a rise in egg theft during the busiest months.

That is the part of the season that matters most right now, not in November. The turtles are actively coming ashore this week. The eggs are actively vulnerable this week. A dog off leash on a dark beach in late August does more damage than the same dog on the same beach in January, because January's nests are already safely relocated to La Máquina or the Las Playitas greenhouse.

What that means if you live near the beach right now

None of this requires becoming a volunteer, though both groups welcome them. It requires a short list of habits that matter more during nesting season than during release season, since the risk to the turtles is highest before the eggs are ever moved to safety.

• Keep dogs leashed on any beach between Punta Lobos and Boca del Carrizal after dark, especially near the dune line where nesting females come ashore.
• Skip flash photography if you happen across a nesting turtle or fresh tracks. Artificial light disorients both adults and hatchlings.
• Leave any nest, egg, or crawling hatchling alone and call one of the two groups instead. Sea turtles are federally protected in Mexico, and handling a nest without authorization is a legal violation, not just bad etiquette.
• If you are hosting guests who want to camp near the beach this fall, steer them away from the dune-front stretches these groups patrol, since unattended campsites are exactly where the egg theft problem has concentrated.

None of that shows up on a beach-day checklist written for tourists planning a single evening visit. It matters because it is a resident's problem, not a visitor's inconvenience, one that resets every July when the nesting season opens again.

Finding an actual release this fall

Once the calendar does shift toward release season, the two groups still behave differently enough that it is worth knowing which one to check. Grupo Tortuguero de Todos Santos posts release dates as hatchlings become ready at La Máquina, generally starting in September and building through January. Tortugueros Las Playitas runs its main leatherback releases from mid-November through February, with its own separate contact channels.

Some visitors have reported inconsistent response times from Las Playitas when trying to confirm a release date in advance, which is worth knowing before you plan an evening around it. The more reliable approach, once release season actually arrives, is checking each group's page the same day rather than locking in plans weeks out. Both organizations rely on volunteers and donations to keep the work running, and schedules shift with the tides, the temperature, and how many hatchlings are ready on a given evening.

For now, the real season is the one nobody photographs: dark beaches, night patrols, and a stretch of coast that is doing more conservation work in August than it will get credit for until the hatchlings finally reach the water in the fall.

Knowing which season you are actually in, and why it matters more here than the postcard version suggests, is the kind of local detail that only comes from paying attention to this stretch of coast over multiple years. If you are curious about what else that kind of attention reveals about life in Todos Santos, from the rhythm of the seasons to the neighborhoods built around them, Sarah Mucha would love to connect.