Cancún

Cancún is the most populous city in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, located in southeast Mexico on the northeast coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. It is a significant tourist destination in Mexico and the seat of the municipality of Benito Juárez. The city is situated on the Caribbean Sea and is one of Mexico's easternmost points. Cancún is located just north of Mexico's Caribbean coast resort area known as the Riviera Maya. It encompasses the Hotel Zone which is the main area for tourism.

Etymology and coat of arms

According to early Spanish sources, the island of Cancún was originally known to its Maya inhabitants as Nizuc, meaning either 'promontory' or 'point of grass'.
The name Cancún, Cancum or Cankun first appears on 18th-century maps. In older English-language documents, the city's name is sometimes spelled Cancoon, an attempt to convey the sound of the name.
Cancún is derived from the Mayan name kàan kun, composed of kàan 'snake' and the verb kum ~ kun 'to swell, overfill'. Two translations have been suggested: the first is 'nest of snakes' and the second, less accepted one is 'place of the golden snake'. Snake iconography was prevalent at the pre-Columbian site of Nizuc.
The shield of the municipality of Benito Juárez, which represents the city of Cancún, was designed by the Mexican-American artist Joe Vera.
It is divided into three parts: the color blue symbolizes the Caribbean Sea, the yellow the sand and the red the sun with its rays.

History

In the years after the Spanish conquest of Yucatán, much of the Maya population died or left as a result of disease, warfare, and famines, leaving only small settlements on Isla Mujeres and Cozumel Island.
Cancún is a planned city, created to foster tourism. When development of the area as a resort was started on January 23, 1970, Isla Cancún had only three residents, all caretakers of the coconut plantation of Don José de Jesús Lima Gutiérrez, who lived on Isla Mujeres. Some 117 people lived in nearby Puerto Juárez, a fishing village and military base. Cancún was created as a government project to boost tourism. In 1967 the Mexican government allocated 2million dollars fund to be administered by the Bank of Mexico to determine the feasibility of creating new recreational zones, “preferably where no other viable development alternatives exist." This was entrusted to INFRATUR, a Bank of Mexico agency.
Due to the reluctance of investors to gamble on an unknown area, the Mexican federal government financed the first nine hotels.
The city began as a tourism project in 1974 as an Integrally Planned Center, a pioneer of FONATUR, formerly known as INFRATUR. Since then, it has undergone a comprehensive transformation from being a fisherman's island to being one of the two most well-known Mexican resorts, along with Acapulco. The growth of Cancún outpaced the rest of Quintana Roo during the late 20th century, for example, from 1970 to 1980 the population grew annually on average by 62.3%. In hindsight, the development of Cancún as tourist city performed better on a number of metrics than what Mexican state planners had envisioned. Once outside the main tourist areas of the World the growth of Cancún was part of a wider touristification of northern Quintana Roo while in the south and east of the state the timber industry developed more than tourism. From places like Cancún the tourism industry then expanded from the 1990s onward into indigenous territories and protected areas in inland sites.
Most 'Cancunenses' are from Yucatán and other Mexican states. A growing number are from the rest of the Americas and Europe. The municipal authorities have struggled to provide public services for the constant influx of people, as well as limiting squatters and irregular developments, which in 2006 occupied an estimated ten to fifteen percent of the mainland area on the fringes of the city.
In 2023, a record 21million tourists visited Cancún, topping the original estimate of 20.5million.

Public safety concerns

In the 21st century, Cancún had largely avoided the violence associated with the trade of illegal drugs; however, drugs are sold to tourists in bars and night clubs. Cancún has gradually been reported for being a center of money laundering.
The links with Cancún date from the 1990s and early 2000s, when the area was controlled by the Juárez and Gulf drug cartels. By 2010, Los Zetas, a group that broke away from the
Gulf Cartel, had taken control of many smuggling routes through the Yucatán, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
There have been a number of violent acts in the city related to drug trafficking. Between 2013 and 2016, there were 76 murders: 31 in 2016, and at least 193 in 2017, the vast majority related to drug trafficking. Most have occurred in the urban nucleus, and there have been various violent episodes with firearms in the so-called "Zona Hotelera". Beginning in 2018 with a high wave of violence, Cancún is above the national average in homicides. In January 2018 alone, there were 33 homicides, triple the number from January 2017.

Sargassum

Starting in 2015, Cancun tourism was significantly impacted by the appearance of large amounts of smelly, unsightly brown Sargassum seaweed on its white sand beaches every summer. By 2021, Sargassum season had become an annual occurrence at many Caribbean beach destinations, including Cancun.

Geography

City layout

Apart from the island tourist zone, the Mexican residential section of the city, the downtown part of which is known as "El Centro", follows a master plan that consists of "supermanzanas", giant trapezoids with a central, open, non-residential area cut in by u-shaped residential streets.
Cancún's mainland or downtown area has diverged from the original plan; development is scattered around the city. The remaining undeveloped beach and lagoon front areas outside the Hotel Zone are now under varying stages of development, in Punta Sam and Puerto Juarez to the north, continuing along Bonampak and south toward the airport along Boulevard Donaldo Colosio. One development abutting the Hotel Zone is Puerto Cancún; Malecon Cancún is another large development.

Climate

Cancún has a tropical climate, specifically a tropical wet and dry climate, with little temperature difference between months, but pronounced rainy and dry seasons. The city is hot year-round, and moderated by onshore trade winds, with an annual mean temperature of. Unlike inland areas of the Yucatán Peninsula, sea breezes restrict high temperatures from reaching on most afternoons. Annual rainfall is around, falling on 115 days per year.
The rainy season runs from late August through November, and the dry season runs from November through April. The hurricane season runs from June through November. The Hotel Zone juts into the Caribbean Sea and is therefore surrounded by ocean keeping daytime temperatures around cooler. Windspeeds are higher than at the airport located some distance inland, which is the official meteorological station for Cancún; averages are shown below.
Thanks to the Yucatán current continually bringing warm water from further south, the sea temperature is always very warm, with lows of in winter and highs of in summer.

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
79 °F 26 °C	79 °F 26 °C	79 °F 26 °C	81 °F 27 °C	82 °F 28 °C	84 °F 29 °C	84 °F 29 °C	84 °F 29 °C	84 °F 29 °C	84 °F 29 °C	82 °F 28 °C	81 °F 27 °C

Tropical storms and hurricanes

The tropical storm season lasts from May to December, the rainy season extending into January with peak precipitation in October. February to early May tend to be drier with only occasional scattered showers. Cancún is located in one of the main Caribbean hurricane impact areas. Although large hurricanes are rare, they have struck near Cancún in recent years, Hurricane Wilma in 2005 being the largest. Hurricane Gilbert made a devastating direct hit on Cancún in September 1988 and the tourist hotels needed to be rebuilt. In both cases, federal, state and municipal authorities were well prepared to deal with most of the effects on tourists and local residents. Hurricane Dean in 2007 also made its mark on the city of Cancún.
Making landfall in 1988, Hurricane Gilbert was the second most intense hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic basin. It landed on the Yucatán peninsula after crossing over the island of Cozumel. In the Cancún region, a loss of $87 million due to a decline in tourism was estimated for the months of October, November and December in 1988.
On October 21, 2005, Hurricane Wilma made landfall on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, with strong winds in excess of. The hurricane's eye first passed over the island of Cozumel, and then made an official landfall near Playa del Carmen in the state of Quintana Roo at around 11 p.m. local time on October 21 with winds near. Portions of the island of Cozumel experienced the calm eye of Wilma for several hours with some blue skies and sunshine visible at times. The eye slowly drifted northward, with the center passing just to the west of Cancún, Quintana Roo.
Two years later after Hurricane Wilma, in 2007, Hurricane Dean made landfall as a Category 5 storm in Majahual, to the south of Cancún. Fierce winds at the edge of Dean's impact cone stripped sand off of beaches from Punta Cancún to Punta Nizuc.
The authorities asked tourism operators to suspend sending tourists to Cancún while Hurricane Dean was approaching, but did ask airlines to send empty planes, which were then used to evacuate tourists already there.