You cannot book swimming with orcas. No agency guarantees it, there is no date on which they will show up. That is why the sentence Spanish presenter Raquel Sánchez Silva said after coming out of the water at Cabo Pulmo does not sound like marketing: "I hope I never forget this, because this is very hard to happen." Seven orcas, one afternoon, and an entire family trip that paid for itself in those minutes.

The trip started in Mexico City, where she stayed in the Polanco district with her partner Matías Dumont and twins Mateo and Bruno, who turn eleven soon. The first major stop was Teotihuacan, a pre-Hispanic city founded over 2,000 years ago, which at its peak had between 100,000 and 200,000 inhabitants and an urban plan aligned with the stars. That is not a tourist brochure fact - that is a civilisation doing astronomy while Europe still did not know what it was doing.

The canals UNESCO protected, and the city nearly lost

The Basilica of Guadalupe on Tepeyac hill drew attention with its 42-metre central column, and the complex marks the spot where, according to tradition, the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego in 1531. In Xochimilco they rode trajineras through the canals and the chinampas - the artificial farming islands under UNESCO protection. That is a pre-Hispanic landscape that has survived inside one of the largest cities in the world, which is a small miracle in itself.

Coyoacán offered the Blue House, Frida Kahlo's birthplace where she lived until her death, and which has operated as a museum since 1958. Then came the Roma and Condesa districts, Chapultepec castle and forest, the National Museum of Anthropology and Paseo de la Reforma, which turns into a pedestrian zone on Sundays.

The beach with a quota: 450 people per shift

The second part of the trip took the family to Baja California Sur, based in the city of La Paz. Balandra beach is the one from the photographs - turquoise water, white sand - and that is exactly why entry is limited: 450 people per shift, from 8am to noon and from 1pm to 5pm. The limit exists because without it the beach everyone is looking for stops being the thing everyone was looking for.

The Espíritu Santo archipelago, with its red rock islands and protected marine zones within the Gulf of California World Heritage site, is home to one of the largest sea lion colonies in the region. Further on are Los Cabos, where developed tourism sits right beside desert wilderness, and Todos Santos - a "magic town" since 2006, with historic buildings, galleries, craft workshops and the Hotel California, which for decades has been rumoured to have inspired the Eagles song. The link has never been confirmed, and the hotel lives very well off it.

The world's aquarium, with numbers behind the name

Jacques Cousteau called the Sea of Cortez "the world's aquarium", and the numbers hold the name up: 900 marine species and 33 species of marine mammals. In La Ventana the family saw sea lions, turtles, dolphins and whales.

Cabo Pulmo National Park has been protected since 1995 and holds the northernmost coral reef in the eastern Pacific - and the only one in the Gulf of California. Thirty years of protection is not an abstraction: it is the reason anyone can get into that water today at all and run into seven orcas. Protection does not create miracles, it just allows them to happen.