50 years ago, Cancun was totally unknown to the world. With a population of about 100 people, the “city”, if it could be called that, was located in one of the poorest regions of Mexico. It had strange sand dunes and a coastline filled with swamps, mangroves, and a snake-infested jungle. But over the past five decades, it has become one of Mexico’s top tourist attractions.
This change did not happen by chance.
In 1968, Mexico used algorithms, computer models and the best brains and know-how of a modern nation to select the site, a 15-kilometer strip of jungle island off the coast of Quintana Roo.
By 1972, when bulldozers were rapidly transforming this beautiful fishing village on the Yucatan Peninsula, a New York Times reporter asked the head of Infratur, the Bank of Mexico agency that planned the first government foray into the business of the resorts, why all that was done. Antonio Enríquez Savignac’s response was as follows: “Money.”
In the late 1960s, the Mexican government became interested in develop the country’s tourism sector to boost the economy. To determine the perfect spot, officials looked at statistics from several successful tourist locations, including Miami Beach and Acapulco.
They collected information on the number of tourists: they developed a consumer profile of the typical Caribbean beach tourist and compiled a dossier of their migratory habits. Also the number of hotel rooms, average temperatures, average rainfall and hurricane events and entered them into a computer program. The system selected several candidates for a new tourist city.
Officials then visited each site along Mexico’s roughly 10,000-kilometre coastline to personally inspect beaches, swim in their waters and see living conditions first-hand.
The team even reproduced hurricanes in a laboratory of the University of Mexico, with hotels built to scale and waves five centimeters high. The architects studied the results and ruled that the hotels would have to be built to withstand the worst possible attack from the weather. Nearly every beachfront jungle community in Mexico was vying to be the next Acapulco.
In one place, the presence of sharks was a failure. In another, the leaf-cutter ants that came down from the mountains and devoured everything in their path disqualified a place. The Bank of Mexico made its fleet of five aircraft available to the team. They used them to distribute newly printed currency, and sometimes Infratur people were pressured into buying “petroleum pesos” in exchange for free transportation.
The team finally reduced the choice to 25 sites and then gave preference to those areas where the people were extremely poor and there was no existing industry. The Yucatan peninsula and the island of Cancun proved to be ideal in this regard. In the end, they chose Cancun. Why? because it had good weather all year round, blue sea and white sand beaches. It was also close to great archaeological treasures, such as the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza and Tulum.
Key to economic growth
In the creation of Infratur, a basic objective was regional economic development, particularly in areas where unemployment was high. Infratur was authorized to purchase land to prevent speculation on the sites it wished to develop and to induce private investment by providing basic services: airports, bridges and highways, and water, electricity and telephone services.
In 1967, the federal government allocated a fund of 2 million euros to be managed by the bank to determine the feasibility of creating new recreational areas, the development of Cancun was approved in 1969 and finally began in 1970 with the construction of a highway from Puerto Juárez and a small airfield.
“Like bankers, we approach this from the point of view of a banker, taking into account everything that can be measured, entering it into a computer and leaving nothing to chance. We pointed out that the number of Caribbean tourists from the US had increased from 400,000 in 1961 to 1.5 million in 1969 and that, even with the recession, this number would exceed 2 million in 1972. We had to show that US tourists traveled farther and they stayed longer,” Savignac explained.
In January 1970, the technicians arrived and began to build the spa. In September 1974, the first hotel in Cancun opened its doors. In one year, Cancun created more hotels and received around 100,000 tourists. Today, Cancún receives about two million visitors a year and generates about a quarter of the country’s tourism revenue.
In the late 1980s, Cancún’s population numbered around 120,000. A 2015 census report by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) reported around 740,000 people. Most hotels are located on a 17-mile stretch of beach known as the Hotel Zone. Today, Cancun is one of the top tourist destinations in the world, which is remarkable considering how relatively young it is.
While creating a great source of income, Cancun tourism has also had a huge impact on the environment. One of the biggest problems is water pollution due to sewage from hotels (about 95% of all wastewater in the area), far more than treatment plants can handle.
Raw sewage ends up in the sea and becomes a threat to aquatic ecosystems, sometimes introducing pathogens that affect coral growth. The resort has also significantly increased the amount of garbage produced, some of which is sent to illegal dumps. Hotel construction and human presence have also eroded beaches, threatening local reefs and coral systems.