Cancun

Cancún has a tropical climate, specifically a tropical wet and dry climate, with few temperature differences between seasons, but pronounced rainy and dry seasons.

The city is warm year-round and moderated by onshore trade winds, with an annual mean temperature of 27.1°C. Unlike inland areas of the Yucatán Peninsula, sea breezes restrict high temperatures from reaching 35 °C on most afternoons.

Annual rainfall is around 1,340 millimeters, falling on 115 days per year.

More temperate conditions occur from November to February with occasional refreshing northerly breezes, it is drier and becomes hotter in March and April. It is hottest from May to September, due to its proximity to the Caribbean and Gulf humidity is high year-round, especially during hurricane season (averages close to 70% on rain-free days).

The Hotel Zone juts into the Caribbean Sea, it is surrounded by ocean, therefore, daytime temperatures are around 1-2°C less and wind speeds are higher than at the airport located some distance inland, which is the official meteorological station for Cancún.

Thanks to the Yucatán current continually bringing warm water from further south, the sea temperature is always very warm, with lows of 26 °C in winter and highs of 29°C in summer.

Hurricanes

The tropical storm season lasts from May to December, the rainy season extends into January with peak precipitation in October. February to early May tends 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, with 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.

Hurricane Gilbert – 1988

1988’s 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 USD due to a decline in tourism was estimated for the months of October, November, and December in 1988.

Hurricane Wilma – 2005

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 240 km/h.

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 midnight on October 22 EDT with winds near 230 km/h.

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.

Hurricane Dean – 2007

Two years later, in 2007, Hurricane Dean made landfall as a Category 5 storm in Majahual, 310 km to the south of Cancún. Fierce winds at the edge of Dean’s impact cone stripped sand off 12.1 km 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.

Place names

The name Cancún, Cancum, or Cankun first appears on 18th-century maps. The meaning of Cancún is unknown, and it is also unknown whether the name is of Maya origin.

In older English-language documents, the city’s name is sometimes spelled “Cancoon”, an attempt to convey the sound of the name.

If it is of Maya origin, possible translations include “Place/Seat/Throne of the Snake” or “Enchanted Snake”.

As documented in the earliest colonial sources, the island of Cancún was originally known to its Maya inhabitants as Nizuc (in Yucatec Maya meaning either “promontory” or “point of grass”. Snake iconography was prevalent at the pre-Columbian site of Nizuc.

There are two possible translations of Cancún, based on the Mayan pronunciation “kaan kun”.

• The first translation is “nest of snakes”.
• The second version and less accepted is “place of the gold snake”.

Shield

The shield of the municipality of Benito Juárez, which represents the city of Cancún, was designed by the Californian Mexican-American artist Joe Vera. It is divided into three parts:

• Blue color symbolizes the Caribbean Sea
• Yellow is the color of the sand
• Red is the color of the sun with its rays

Prehispanic era

During the Classic and the post-Classic periods, the Maya maintained a commercial network from Laguna de Terminos to Honduras.

For this activity, they established maritime routes whose trajectories crossed the entire coast of the current Mexican state of Quintana Roo. That’s why they built buildings by the sea to carry out commercial exchanges, as well as to monitor and help navigation.

According to archaeological studies, the sites El Meco, Yamil Lu’um, and El Rey were inhabited points until the 16th century. In the Chronicles of the Indies was described a town with the name of Belma, probably it was El Meco.

Background to the construction of the city

The area that now includes Cancun and Isla Mujeres was explored by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba in 1517. The first geographical reference to Cancun or Cancuen Island is found on a map drawn by the cartographer Juan de Dios González in the year 1776.

During the 19th century and in the year 1841, Captain Richard Owen Smith, on a tour of the Caribbean and Central America, indicates in his logbook the existence of pre-Hispanic buildings at the north and south ends of the island.

It follows that the sites in question are El Rey, Yamil Lu’um, and El Meco.

The American John Lloyd Stephens and the British Frederick Catherwood described in 1842, although very briefly, the existence of two buildings located in Punta Kancum. They probably referred to the temples that are located in Yamil Lu’um, in the Hotel Zone.

..In the afternoon we headed towards the mainland, passing through the island of Kancum, which is a strip of land covered with dunes and some stone buildings that are still visible. All this coast is covered with rock reefs with one or another narrow channel, which allows passage to the canoes, to enter to find shelter, but at night it is very dangerous to pretend. We had very good wind, but since the next point was still quite a distance away, the skipper (captain) determined to anchor at four o’clock in the afternoon to the lee of Punta Nizuc..

Alice and Augustus Le Plongeon visited the island in 1877 and 1878.

They mentioned the existence of a site they call Ciudad Nizucte in the far south, possibly the current site of El Rey because in the surroundings of Punta Nizuc, there are no vestiges of other pre-Hispanic settlements have been found.

Then, in 1895, the American William H. Holmes arrived on the island with the Allison V. Armor expedition and mentioned the existence of numerous buildings of identical appearance to those on neighboring islands and on the continent.

He probably referred to the same sites: El Meco, Yamil Lu’um, and El Rey.

20 century

In the years after the Conquest, much of the Maya population died off or left as a result of disease, warfare, piracy, and famines, leaving only small settlements on Isla Mujeres and Cozumel Island.

When the development of the area as a resort was started on January 23, 1970, Isla Cancún had only three residents, caretakers of the coconut plantation of Don José de Jesús Lima Gutiérrez, who lived on Isla Mujeres.

Some 117 people lived in nearby Puerto Juarez, a fishing village and military base.

Due to the reluctance of investors to gamble in an unknown area, the Mexican government had to finance the first nine hotels.

The first hotel financed was the Hyatt Cancún Caribe, but the first hotel built was the Playa Blanca, which later became a Blue Bay hotel. It is now named Temptation Resort. At the time it was an elite destination, famous for its virgin white-sand beaches.

The city began as a tourism project in 1974 as an Integrally Planned Center, a pioneer of FONATUR (National Fund for Tourism Development), formerly known as INFRATUR.

Since then, it has undergone a comprehensive transformation from being a fisherman’s island surrounded by virgin forest and undiscovered shores to being one of the two most well-known Mexican resorts, along with Acapulco.

The World Tourism Organization (WTO), through its foundation UNWTO-Themis, awarded the Best of the Best award “for excellence and good governance” to the Trust for Tourism Promotion of Cancun on February 3, 2007.

This award ensured Cancún the ongoing support of the Department of Education and Knowledge Management of the WTO.

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 now occupy an estimated ten to fifteen percent of the mainland area on the fringes of the city.

In the 21st century, Cancún had largely avoided the bloodshed associated with the trade of illegal drugs but is known for its retail drug sales to tourists as well as 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.

In recent years Los Zetas, a group that broke away from the Gulf Cartel, has taken control of many smuggling routes through the Yucatán, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference was held in Cancún from November 29 to December 10 of that year.

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 “super manzanas” (“superblocks”), giant trapezoids with a central, open, non-residential area cut in by u-shaped residential streets.

These open centers usually have walkways and ‘sidewalks’ around a central garden park, football fields, a library, etc., which make the mainland “Mexican” Cancún bicycle-friendly.

The residential roads of central or ‘Mainland’ Cancún, U-shaped, and cul-de-sacs, insulate housing from the noise and congestion of the main flow of traffic.

Mainland Cancún has a central market that resembles an outlet mall, and colorful buildings on a pedestrian city block.

• Ave. Tulum is the main north-south artery, connecting downtown to the airport, which is some 30 km south of downtown.
• Ave. Tulum is bisected by Ave. Cobá.
• East of Ave. Tulum, Cobá becomes Ave. Kukulcan serves as the primary road through the 7-shaped hotel zone.
• Ave. Tulum ends on the north side at Ave. Paseo José López Portillo which connects to the main highway west to Chichén Itzá and Mérida.
• Another major north-south road is Ave. Bonampak which runs roughly parallel to Ave. Tulum.

The main ferry to Isla Mujeres is located in Puerto Juarez, on Ave. Paseo José López Portillo.

To save on the cost of installing sewer systems and other public services, the design of much of the rest of the city reverted to the grid plan after Hurricane Gilbert in 1988.

The newest upper-middle-class residential areas reflect the original plan but are much less intimate.

Less expensive developments are composed almost entirely of identical one- or two-story small row houses, sometimes built around interior plazas or 4 story apartment blocks.

Until recently, most mainland buildings were four stories or shorter; since 2005, there has been an influx of condominium and luxury retail and office space concentrated along Ave. Bonampak.

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, also Malecon Cancún is another large development.

Cancun Airport’s old Control Tower Memorial

Despite being a young city, Cancun has a memorial monument of its foundation on a replica of the old Airport Control Tower that resembles its own date of foundation.

The original Control Tower was a provisional wooden structure to satisfy the operative needs of the recently created airport.

Some documents of the city mention that at that time there were no other formal buildings constructed in the city, possibly the first built structure in Cancun’s recent history.

The old airport was located in the same part of the city that today corresponds to Kabah Avenue.

The tower is 15 meters tall, has a staircase of 45 steps, and has a base dimension of 5 x 5 meters. The memorial was first built in 2002, with the donations of Aerocaribe, a local airline, but the structure was damaged after Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

After the claims of the local people asking to rebuild the tower memorial, a new version was built in 2010, which was later abandoned without proper maintenance until Woox Pinturas, another local wood maintenance company, made a donation to restore the structure to its original appearance.

Nightlife in Cancun

It is not possible to have vacation time in Cancún without being caught by its nightlife, which flows in clubs where international DJs and acrobatic performances can be found.

In addition, the fun can go beyond the shore and you can enjoy parties on board a pirate boat or on a trajinera.

Cancun beaches are mainly located along the Kukulkan Boulevard in the Hotel Zone.

If you travel with children, or elderly people, or in the case that you can´t swim very well, we suggest you choose a hotel located between kilometers 3 to 8.5. On those specific beaches, ocean waves are soft as they are located in front of Isla Mujeres which allows the formation of a bay called Bahía de Isla Mujeres.

On the other hand, if you stay downtown, you will be able to find 11 public beaches such as Perlas, Langostas, Tortugas, Delfines, and Chac Mol.

Most of them have been granted the Blue Flag eco-label which certifies coast destinations that have reached top standards in water quality, environmental management, safety, services, and environmental education activities.

Besides having the best beaches in the world, you can enjoy exciting water activities in Cancún such as diving, snorkeling, kayaking, sailing on a Catamaran or speed boat, flyboarding, windsurfing, and paddle boarding in the Caribbean Sea or the Nichupte Lagoon.

There are some small Mayan vestiges of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in Cancún. El Rey (Las Ruinas del Rey) is located in the Hotel Zone. El Meco, a more substantial site, is found on the mainland just outside the city limits on the road north to Punta Sam.

Close by in the Riviera Maya and the Grand Costa Maya, there are sites such as Cobá and Muyil (Riviera) the small Polé (now Xcaret), and Kohunlich, Kinichná, Dzibanché, Oxtankah, Tulum, and Chacchoben, in the south of the state. Chichén Itzá is in the neighboring state of Yucatán.

When it comes to food, Cancún offers a culinary experience through the fusion of Mexican and international flavors which are masterfully developed by the best chefs in the world.

There are restaurants that have been granted the 5 Diamonds of the American Automobile Association and have been recognized by the Michelin Guide.

Cancún is served by the Cancún International Airport with an added main runway that commenced operation in October 2009. It has many flights to North America, Central America, South America, Asia, and Europe.

It is located in the northeast of the Yucatán Peninsula serving an average of about fifteen million passengers per year. The airport is located around 20 km from the hotel zone, approximately a 20-minute trip by car.

The island of Isla Mujeres is located off the coast and is accessible by ferry from Puerto Juárez.

You can dial 078 from any phone, where you can find free information about tourist attractions, airports, travel agencies, car rental companies, embassies and consulates, fairs and exhibitions, hotels, hospitals, financial services, migratory and other issues.

Or dial the toll-free (in Mexico) number 01-800-006-8839.

You can also request information the email correspondencia@sectur.gob.mx

MORE EMERGENCY NUMBERS:

General Information: 040 (not free)

National Emergency Service: 911

Radio Patrols: 066
Police (Emergency): 060
Civil Protection: +52(55)5683-2222
Anonymous Complaint: 089

Setravi (Transport Mobility): +52(55)5209-9913
Road Emergency: 074

Cruz Roja: 065 o +52(55)5557-5757
Firefighters: 068 o +52(55)5768-3700