The resort city that transformed from a fishing village of 117 people in 1970 to Mexico's most-visited destination — where the Zona Hotelera's Caribbean beach strip faces south towards the cenotes and Mayan temples of the Yucatán Peninsula, and the authentic Mexico of El Centro district lives 15 minutes from the tourist zone
Cancún (1.0 million; metro 1.3 million) is the most visited destination in Mexico, receiving around 9 million tourists per year — transformed from an uninhabited barrier island with a population of 117 people in 1970 to Mexico's purpose-built resort city following a 1969 government computer study that identified it as the ideal beach resort location. The Hotel Zone (Zona Hotelera), a 25-kilometre strip of hotels, clubs, and shopping malls on a narrow barrier island between the Caribbean Sea and Nichupté Lagoon, is one of the most concentrated resort developments in the world. Cancún is also t…
The Yucatán Peninsula was the heartland of the Maya civilization — at its peak (250–900 CE), Maya city-states (Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, Tulum, Cobá, El Meco near modern Cancún) developed the most accurate calendar in the pre-Columbian Americas, built the only known fully-developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas, and established trade routes spanning from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Coast. The Spanish conquest of the Yucatán (1527–1547) was the most prolonged and difficult conquest in New Spain — the Maya resisted longer than the Aztec or Inca. The site of modern Cancún was an…