Things to Do in Cancun: A Complete Guide

Cancun sits on a narrow barrier island shaped like the number seven, a 14-mile strip of white limestone sand separating the Caribbean Sea from the Nichupté Lagoon. The city didn't exist before 1970: Mexico's tourism ministry selected this empty spit of coast from a computer analysis of climate data, water temperature, and beach quality, then built a resort corridor from scratch on what had been a coconut plantation and fishing camp with fewer than a hundred residents. Today nearly 900,000 people live here, most of them in Ciudad Cancún, the mainland grid city that tourists rarely see, where Avenida Tulum runs past taco stands and hardware shops and the Parque de las Palapas fills with families eating marquesitas on weekend evenings. The Zona Hotelera, that distinctive L-shaped island, is where the all-inclusive towers line up along Kukulcán Boulevard, each one facing east toward water so clear you can read a book through three feet of it. The sand itself is ground coral and calcium carbonate, cool underfoot even at midday because it reflects rather than absorbs heat. A first-timer's day tends to split between the hotel strip and somewhere older: Isla Mujeres by ferry, the Mayan ruin at El Rey wedged between a golf course and the lagoon, or the cenotes south toward Puerto Morelos where the limestone shelf fractures into freshwater sinkholes. The time zone is Eastern Standard year-round, no daylight saving, which catches Americans off guard in summer when Cancun clocks fall an hour behind New York. The wet season runs June through October with hard afternoon storms that clear in forty minutes, leaving the air smelling like wet concrete and frangipani. The dry months, November to April, bring nortes: cold fronts that churn the Caribbean gray-green for a day or two before the trademark turquoise reasserts itself.