It’s 2pm in Tulum and the Hotel Ikal beach club is getting ready for their “ecstatic dance” session.
Inside a thatched-roof pavilion, a sweaty crowd dances to a “folktronica” track played by a DJ whose next stop is Berlin. A few wide stone steps below, a group of thirtysomething athletes hit volleyballs on a beach that smells of seaweed and sunscreen.
The room in the ‘Tree House’ costs $800 a night and a bottle of Crémant de Bourgogne sparkling wine, $110.
Just a decade ago, Tulum was a sleepy fishing village that served as a gateway to nearby Mayan ruins. Today it is part of the global party circuit and is marketed as a jungle paradise with intense nightlife.
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Tulum is part of the global party circuit and is marketed as a jungle paradise with an intense nightlife
The city’s beach strip is lined with upscale restaurants, designer clothing boutiques and billboards advertising handpoke tattoos and yoga classes.
With its clubs, linen-clad models and ample supplies of marijuana, ayahuasca and cocaine, andIt’s the kind of place where “hippies become millionaires and millionaires become hippies”, says tour guide Hervé Pech.
Tulum and its bigger cousin Cancún, two hours up the coast by car, are in the midst of a boom. Tourism is 6 percent above 2019 and airlines have scheduled 20 percent more seats on flights from the United States this year than before the pandemic. Arrivals at Cancun International Airport exceeded 22 million last year, 82 percent more than in 2020.
In the last two years, more than 16,000 new hotel rooms have been built in the state of Quintana Roo, that includes Cancun and Tulum. The expansion is evidence, and momentum, of Mexico’s rise up the world tourism charts. In 2019 the country was the seventh most visited destination; and a ranking prepared with data from the World Tourism Organization places it as No. 2 in the world, behind France, in 2021.
Mexico never closed
That’s largely because, unlike most other places, Mexico never really shut down. Even as European capitals demanded Covid passports and PCR tests and the United States barred entry to travelers from dozens of countries, Mexico was quick to open its doors, without asking questions, without the need for tests.
The government argued that tourism was such an important engine of the economy that Mexico could not afford to close its borders.
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At the start of the pandemic, poverty in Quintana Roo increased and the state lost 97,000 jobs, but by June 2020 the hotels were already reopening. In December, the governor tweeted that people should keep a healthy distance to stop the spread of covid while boasting that Cancun had returned to 500 flights a day.
For workers who have to wait tables, scrub bathrooms and drive buses or taxis for all those visitors, the blessing has been mixed. Mexico’s most popular beach destinations faded in and out of the news as they suffered coronavirus spikes, presumably sparked by tourists.
Roger Martín Moreno says he believes he contracted the virus while handing out drinks and coffee on a tour bus. “I started the same way, a week with a fever, with a fever, and then, little by little, I started short of breath until I could only breathe lying down,” says the 32-year-old, who adds that At least two drivers from his agency died from covid.
The mirror of Acapulco
Meanwhile, concern about the sustainability of the boom increases, growing visitor volume threatens freshwater caves characteristics of the area, called cenotes, as well as the largest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere.
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Some fear that Tulum could go the way of Acapulcowhich in the mid-20th century became a glittering destination where Frank Sinatra escaped for a secret birthday, Elizabeth Taylor celebrated her third wedding, and the family of the Shah of Iran took refuge after the revolution.
Acapulco suffered an unplanned and, later, explosive growth in crime generated by drug cartels
But the city suffered from an explosive growth of unplanned and, later, crime generated by drug cartels. Today it is one of the most dangerous places in a dangerous country.
“When the very strong violence began, which had to do with drug trafficking, international tourists fled,” says David Espino, author of ‘Acapulco Killer: Chronicles from Paradise Lost.’
Cancun was meant to be the anti-Acapulco. In the 1960s, the government designated the pristine stretch of sandy beach on the Caribbean coast as your next big tourist destination, with specific areas for hotels, houses and an international airport.
Large tracts of land were set aside for conservation, streets and parks were laid out, and modern electrical and sewage systems were installed by contractors. But the outskirts of the city, what is known as the Riviera Maya, which stretches to Tulum and beyond, did not receive the same attention.
harm and drugs
In Tulum, only 15 percent of the buildings are connected to the sewage system, meaning tons of untreated waste ends up seeping into the groundwater, fouling beaches and killing the reef.
Many hotels have not been connected to the electricity grid, forcing them to use diesel generators. Construction workers from other states often build squatter camps on undeveloped land. A train line along the coast planned to open next year, as well as a local airport expected in 2024, will only add to the crowds.
“It’s entering a bit of a crisis. It’s a very fast growth,” says Gonzalo Merediz, head of a sustainable development and environmental conservation organization.
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‘He is entering a bit of a crisis. It is a very fast growth,’ says Gonzalo Merediz, head of a sustainable development and environmental conservation organization
While the state government says it’s aiming for responsible development, divers say the cenotes are sometimes covered with dirt from nearby settlements and sunscreen used by tourists.
That puts the guides in a bind: risking the health of the local environment and long-term economic benefits or being denied tips from angry customers when told they can’t get in the water. “In the cenotes I do see that they are already very polluted, I tell people that it will not be worth it,” says diving instructor Alan Chuc.
Nevertheless, many visitors come not just for nature, but for easy access to drugs, which creates another set of problems. Drug cartels are engaged in a turf war in the area that has fueled a rise in crime, such as protection racketeering, known as cobro de piso, affecting everyone from hotel owners to street vendors on beaches. .
Since October, repeated shootings in the area have left suspected criminals and at least three tourists dead. Last January, two Canadians were killed near Playa del Carmen. A month later, a pair of suspected traffickers were shot to death in an upscale restaurant in Tulum.
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Locals say police clean up quickly after shootings to keep tourists from freaking out, but not always fast enough. After a shooting in Tulum, a nearby guest immediately left in the middle of the night, recalls Samantha Raga, a former manager of a luxury hotel. “She came in a horrible crisis, she told her she didn’t care if she lost her deposit,” says Raga. “She grabbed her bags and left.”
maya averbuch
BLOOMBERG
TULUM (MEXICO)
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