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
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
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 2 million 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 ( Fondo Nacional de Fomento al Turismo, National Fund for Tourism Development), 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 cenutury, 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 envisionaged. 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 21 million tourists visited Cancún, topping the original estimate of 20.5 million.
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.
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.
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.
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 (1989 USD) 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 (Camino Real Hotel) to Punta Nizuc (Club Med).
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.
The old airport was located on the same part of the city that today corresponds to the Kabah Avenue. The tower is 15 meters tall, has a 45 step staircase and has a base dimension of 5 × 5 meters. The memorial was first built in 2002 with a donation by Aerocaribe, a local airline, but the structure was damaged after Hurricane Wilma in 2005. After pleas by the local people to rebuild the tower memorial, a new version was erected in 2010, which was later abandoned without proper maintenance until Woox Pinturas, a local wood maintenance company, made a donation to restore the structure to its original appearance.
Six years after Quintana Roo was recognized as the youngest state in the Mexican Republic and barely a decade after the city of Cancún was born, on October 22 and 23, 1981, the North-South Summit was held at the now defunct Sheraton Hotel. Two abstract pillars made of metal crossbeams gave the structure a stepped Pyramid appearance, with small masts displaying the Flag of the countries attending the 1981 North-South Summit. The author, Lorraine Pinto, added details representing Quetzalcoatl on the sides, resembling the Chichen Itza, located in Yucatan.
In 1994, the municipal authorities of Cancún decided to demolish the commemorative structure because the city had been the scene of one of the most devastating climatic-environmental phenomena in the history of the Yucatan Peninsula, Hurricane Gilberto. The sculpture was irreversibly affected, leaving only the solid concrete base and the metal skeleton.
Due to its crosswise and bare appearance, the locals began to call it "Insectronic", a device manufactured by the Steren company to kill Fly and Mosquito. The municipal authorities decided to keep its base and the dynamics of the Fountain.
Once again, Lorraine Pinto was on call to create what locals began to call the Ceviche Fountain or the Ceviche Roundabout.
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, Dzibanche, Ichkabal Oxtankah, Tulum, Noh Kah, Chacchoben, among others, in the south of the state. Chichén Itzá is in the neighboring state of Yucatán.
The Tiburones de Cancún (Cancún Sharks) were a professional American football team who played in the Fútbol Americano de México (FAM) league until the league's dissolution in 2022.
The city is also home to the baseball team Tigres de Quintana Roo, who play in the Mexican League (LMB).
In October 2023, the WTA Finals (Women's Tennis Association) were held in Cancún, in a temporary, outdoor, hard court stadium in Plaza Quintana Roo with a capacity of 4,300. Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina criticized the facility, saying that it was unacceptable for high level tennis, not ready in time for practice, and there was no time to fix it. Aryna Sabalenka labels WTA Finals court in Cancún unacceptable for high-level tennis, Associated Press/ABC News Online, 2023-10-31
Since February 2025, the Cancún Country Club Residencial & Golf in Cancún hosts the WTA 125 tennis tournament " Cancún Tennis Open", that takes place on outdoor .
Bus service from Cancun Airport to Downtown Cancun is provided by bus company ADO.
Cancún is also served by five public transportation companies, who are granted concessions by the Quintana Roo Institute of Mobility (Imoveqroo) or the Municipality of Benito Juárez, depending on the type of vehicles operated.
These companies include:
Together, these companies operate 36 bus routes in Cancun and its surrounding areas. Autocar operates 18 routes, both Maya Caribe and Turican operate 28, and Bonfil operates 20. TTE only operates Microbuses and Minibus known as "combis."
Most bus routes terminate near either Plaza Las Americas, the ADO Bus Terminal, Tulum Avenue, or the Hotel Zone.
In the Hotel Zone, the main routes are R-1 and R-2, which run up Kukulkan Avenue. Operated by SEA (a joint venture between Turicun, Autocar, and Maya Caribe), services run around every 5 minutes and go between Tulum Avenue and the Westin Resort.
In April 2024, SEA announced it had received 100 new air-conditioned buses, and were running them along the R-1 and R-2 routes. It was also announced that the two routes would be phased out in favor of a new corridor that ran between the Hotel Zone and Kabah Avenue, with other inner-city routes being considered.
In August 2024, it was reported that a subsidiary of ADO, which already operates buses in Merida, was interested in operating 184 units in Cancun.
ADO already operates long distance bus services from its Cancun Bus Terminal, with destinations including Playa del Carmen, Tulum, Merida and the Airport.
The Tren Maya, under construction since June 2020, will connect Cancún to Palenque, Chiapas with intermediate stops on the Yucatán peninsula and operations started on December 15, 2023. Passengers can take a free electric shuttle from Cancun Airport to the Tren Maya Station.
Public safety concerns
Sargassum
Geography
City layout
Climate
+Average Sea Temperature 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
Attractions
Old Airport Control Tower Memorial
El Ceviche Fountain
Mayan archeological sites
Sports
Transportation
Sister cities
See also
Notes
External links
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