La Paz, Mexico: Hurricane Newton pummeled Mexico's northwestern resort of Los Cabos on Tuesday, uprooting trees and blowing away tin roofs as thousands of tourists and locals hunkered down.
The powerful storm was packing winds of 145km an hour when it made landfall before dawn at the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula, two years after Hurricane Odile ravaged the region prized by American and Canadian tourists.
The US National Hurricane Center said in its latest bulletin that Newton was "battering Baja California Sur (state) with strong winds and heavy rains."
But there were no immediate reports of deaths or disappearances, national civil protection coordinator Luis Felipe Puente wrote on Twitter.
While all highways were accessible, Puente urged "the population not to leave their homes if it is not necessary."
"The winds are very strong," Los Cabos civil protection director Marco Antonio Vazquez told AFP by telephone, adding that power was out before dawn.
"For now the damage includes a lot of branches, a lot of fallen plants, many trees," Vazquez said, adding that telephone cables as well as tin roofs from poorer neighborhoods were on the streets.
Los Cabos, famed for its beaches and nightlife, was pummeled in September 2014 by Hurricane Odile, which left six people dead and caused $1 billion in damage.
Police said five people were arrested for trying to loot two convenience stores in Los Cabos.
Officers guarded several shops in Los Cabos and the state capital, La Paz, to prevent the kind of looting that was seen after Odile struck.
Newton's winds broke some hotel windows but the 14,000 tourists in Los Cabos were "safe" in rooms made to shelter them within the facilities, said state tourism secretary Genaro Ruiz Hernandez.
Some 1,500 people took refuge in shelters in Los Cabos, Vazquez said. Authorities opened shelters with capacity for 16,000 people across the state.
Local airports closed late Monday while small boats were barred from using the ports, with a storm surge expected to hit low-lying areas. Schools were shut down.
North of Los Cabos, in La Paz, where trees also fell, locals put tape on shop windows while 400 people were evacuated from vulnerable areas.
As it moved across the peninsula, Newton's top winds decreased to 130 kilometers per hour. The US hurricane center's latest advisory placed Newton 80 kilometers west of La Paz at 1500 GMT.
It had made landfall just eight kilometers from the beach town of Cabo San Lucas.