what is the setting of the story?

Set during the colonial era in Mexico, The Pearl takes place in a small rural town called La Paz on the Baja Peninsula. The setting of The Pearl has a dreamlike, surrealistic quality. Check out this passage from Chapter Two: "The uncertain air that magnified some things and blotted out others hung over the whole Gulf so that all sights were unreal and vision could not be trusted; so that sea and land had the sharp clarities and the vagueness of a dream."